CONQUER THE WORLD?
The International Proletariat Must and Will

Bob Avakian gave an informal talk in the early fall of 1981
ranging widely over the historical and present questions of the
world proletarian revolution. The author made certain changes
in the text for publication in Revolution magazine
#50.

In this talk, I will
address a number of general themes and then some attempts will
be made to develop particular points within those general
themes. Now this is likely to be—in fact you can almost
guarantee that this is going to be—somewhat scattered and
hopefully, in a way, a little bit trippy. But we’ll see
what happens. The basic purpose and nature of this is to lay
out some ideas about some points that have been spoken to in
the literature, in the reports from the Central Committee that
people have seen and been studying over the past two years or
so; it’s in the character of and has the purpose of an
informal talk to try to develop some of these ideas, to try to
give some play to some thinking on these ideas, many of which
are explicitly only tentative theses. The attempt is not being
made to present worked out ideas. And that’s going to be
true generally of the whole talk and will also be particularly
obvious in relation to certain specific points. So it
shouldn’t be seen even as a “worked out personal
opinion,” let alone any kind of a systematic presentation
of the line and views of the organization overall on these
questions, but should be taken more as something informal to
stimulate some thinking, study and discussion, and hopefully
some further development on a number of these points.

So with that introduction, there are basically going to be
five main points. The first one is: Further historical
perspectives on the first advances in seizing and exercising
power—proletarian dictatorship—and embarking on the
socialist road.

Number 2 is: More on the proletarian revolution as a world
process.

Number 3 is on the subject I call: Leninism as the bridge,
which will be clear when we get into its content.

Number 4 is: Some summation of the Marxist-Leninist movement
arising in the 1960s and the subjective factor in light of the
present and developing situation and the conjuncture shaping
up.

Number 5 is: Some questions related to the line and work of
our Party and our special internationalist responsibilities.
These are the five main points and there’ll be a
conclusion attempting to tie together some of the main themes
of these different points. So to begin:

I. Further Historical Perspectives on the
First Advances in Seizing and Exercising
Power—Proletarian Dictatorship—and Embarking on the
Socialist Road.

First, some thoughts about the Paris Commune. In reading
over Marx’s most systematic summation on the Paris
Commune, The Civil War in France, which also has an
introduction by Engels, it’s striking in light of all the
experience and development not only in the practical struggle
but in the theoretical realm since then that Marx’s
summation is at one and the same time extremely far-sighted and
rather primitive (and this goes also in general for
Engels’ introduction highlighting Marx’s
summation).

This is not too surprising given that the Paris Commune was
the first actual successful seizure of power and lasted only
approximately two months before it was drowned in blood.
It’s also not surprising in that the First International
of which Marx was, at least in an ideological sense and a
general theoretical sense, the leader and in which he was also
very active in a practical way, was itself a mélange of a
number of different tendencies. Scientific socialism
hadn’t thoroughly differentiated and distinguished itself
from a number of utopian and other forms of unscientific
socialism, even within the First International itself, which is
a point the ramifications and implications of which will be
touched on a little bit later.

In terms of his being farsighted, if you read what Marx has
to say it’s very clear that he was able to draw out and
concentrate a lot of key lessons from a very brief and
primitive experience of two months of power in just
Paris—I mean it’s a significant city, but still
just one part, even if it’s a very significant part, of
France. And the decisive lesson that was both drawn out and
driven home much more sharply by Marx at that time—that
the proletariat cannot lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery but has to smash and dismantle it and create its own
machinery, its own revolutionary dictatorship—this was
obviously an example of Marx’s scientific method. And
based on that farsightedness, Marx was able to draw out that
lesson and to illustrate it with a number of particulars from
the brief and somewhat diffuse experience of the Paris
Commune.

But at the same time, while the summation that Marx made in
terms of what it contributed to the long-term struggle and the
overall goal of the international proletariat was, like the
Commune itself, immortal, looking at it in terms of the
experience since then and what’s been summed up out of
that experience, you can see some of its limitations. For
example, this comes through in a number of the comments that
Marx makes about the bureaucracy, the standing army, the
question of universal suffrage and recall of officials, the
question of no officials being paid higher wages than those of
a working person, the way in which education and religion and
culture in general are dealt with.

For instance, he says at one point that the priests (he says
it more poetically than this but basically the point is that
the priests) will be left to stand or fall, that is, they will
be able to eat or not eat, on the basis of whether or not they
can actually win support from their parishioners and they will
not receive state subsidies. This was one of the experiences of
the Commune. Well, obviously, historical experience has shown
us that’s far from enough of a radical rupture to deal
with that problem (and that’s just one small example).
It’s not that Marx said exactly that it was, but his
summation did not go farther than that. And the same thing is
true where he says that one of the great things that the
Commune had to offer, its real strong selling point, to put it
crudely, to the peasantry was that it would be able to reduce
significantly the bureaucratic encumbrance and parasitic body
on society as a whole represented by the bureaucracy and
thereby would be able to essentially cheapen the cost to the
peasantry of the state apparatus. This is linked closely with
the question of whether or not a standing army is necessary,
whether or not you can trim down full-time officials in the
bureaucracy so simply, as Marx seemed to feel and seemed to
conclude from the experience of the Commune, and whether it
would be possible to pay government officials wages no higher
than those of a workman as was done by decree in the
Commune.

All these things, by historical experience and particularly
in that experience where the proletarian dictatorship was
consolidated and existed over a period of time and where the
socialist road was embarked on, have not been possible so far.
Even where a correct line has been carried out, even where
policy can’t be attributed to errors or to right
deviations, it has not been possible to do all these things in
the way that Marx, drawing on the experience of the Commune,
thought not only possible but necessary key weapons in ruling
and transforming society. Life has proved not to be so simple
as that and in fact the possibilities for the proletariat in
Paris to win over the peasantry, not just in the short run but
to win over and maintain their support through all the twists
and turns of the struggle, were not nearly so great nor was the
question nearly so simple as Marx seems to treat it in
The Civil War in France, the concentrated
summation of the Commune.

And similarly, the question of the nation and the
relationship of the struggle in a particular country to the
international struggle was not clearly handled, not only in the
Commune itself—in the outlook and policies of the people
who were leading the Commune at the time, for example, in their
appeals to the soldiers of the reactionary army on a patriotic
basis—but even to a certain degree in the writings of
Marx and comments of Engels in summing up the Commune. The
distinction between the nation and internationalism was not as
clearly drawn as it has been learned that it must be drawn. Of
course, on the one hand this was in the era before imperialism
but, on the other hand, France was an advanced capitalist
country on the threshold of advancing to the imperialist stage
(and it should be said in passing here, that Marx’s
references to “imperialism” in The Civil War
in Francedo not represent the same analysis of a new and
special—in fact the highest and final—stage of
capitalism as done later by Lenin).

Here I’ll just interject a comment which will probably
get me in trouble with somebody somewhere, but one of the
things that is rather clear to me in reading over Lenin’s
polemics on the question of “defense of the
fatherland” during World War 1 is that he has to do a
great deal of work against Kautsky and others who were the
accepted authorities on Marxism—much more so than
Lenin—and who had all the quotes in stock to pull out of
the cupboard to justify their opportunist lines, whether it was
social-democracy or social-chauvinism. In reading this over
it’s clear that, on the one hand, Lenin correctly made
the terrain of the argument that people were misrepresenting
and misusing quotes from Marx and Engels because they were
dealing with statements by Marx and Engels before the era of
imperialism when the only question, as Lenin said, is the
victory of which bourgeoisie would be more favorable
for the proletariat as a whole internationally. But it’s
also clear, or at least in my opinion it’s clear,
especially if you deal with Engels who lived more than a decade
longer than Marx, that not only was it a question of being
quoted out of context, out of condition, time and place, but
also this approach of determining which bourgeoisie’s
victory (or defeat) would be more favorable was still being
applied when it was becoming no longer applicable. As late as
1891, for example, Engels was still talking about defending the
fatherland in Germany in a war against the Tsar.

In other words, Lenin was correct—both in principle
and also in tactics—in making the terrain of battle the
fact that Marx and Engels were being distorted and quoted out
of context, that is out of epoch. But it is also true that
there’s a little bit of dragging some of this approach
behind them, beyond the point where it is still
applicable—particularly in the case of Engels all the way
to 1895 (or at least 1891 when he made his last major statement
that I know of on this question), and some of this is reflected
a little bit in the writings of Marx and Engels on the Commune
where they talk about the question of the working class being
sort of the savior of the nation, the force to regenerate the
nation.

Threads of that line and statements to that effect can be
found in the summation; these were also commonly-held views
among the Communards who themselves were not clear on the
question of a radical rupture with the Republic; this was
revealed even in the way they drew up their calendar which
apparently was a continuation of that of the Republic. In other
words, all the radical ruptures on the question of the nation
vis-a-vis internationalism were not thoroughly made.
Again, of course, the question of imperialism as analyzed by
Lenin had not become fully developed and so was not, therefore,
fully clear. But, with the further experience since then, it
can be seen that there is in general a tendency in Marx’s
summation of the Commune to extrapolate and generalize too much
from that particular experience, and, more particularly,
looking at it from the perspective of historical experience and
its summation since the Commune shows the limitations of the
approach of viewing things from the standpoint of which
bourgeoisie’s victory would be most favorable for the
international proletariat. We should remember that this was in
the context of the war between Germany and France when Marx and
Engels initially supported the right of self-defense, if you
will, of Germany, and then, at a certain point, said “now
they’ve gone over to aggression and so you can’t
take a position of defense of the fatherland anymore in
Germany.” The Communards took up the stand of defense
against Germany in the face of the capitulation of the French
government (which entrenched itself in Versailles in opposition
to the Paris Commune), and were then forced in that context
into a civil war against the French bourgeoisie as represented
and coalescing around Thiers who decided at that point to make
an arrangement with the German leader Bismarck in the effort to
crush the Commune, which they succeeded in doing, as we know.
So this is an extremely complex situation and trying to
approach it from the point of view whether a nation has a right
to self-defense begins already, in my opinion, to verge on
turning into its opposite.

Interestingly enough, there is a comment by Lenin, I think,
about how Germany had already passed into the era of
imperialism before it ever got its nation together, and
that’s one of the examples of what Lenin meant when he
said that the boundaries in nature and society are conditional
and relative. If you’re going to wait for Germany to get
itself fully together as a nation before you say the question
of its right to defense of the fatherland is over and done
with, you will still be waiting because Germany is still not
united, and a lot of people, a lot of social-chauvinists, are
playing on that point right now. Anyway, you’re talking
about the bourgeois epoch, the formation of nations, and all
these things are relative and conditional—there’s
not some perfect nation waiting to be formed—and the
essence of the problem has long since become one of imperialism
and not of nations in these advanced countries. In my opinion
that was already becoming the case by the last several decades
of the 19th century, even by 1870.

We can see some confusion in Marx and Engels, again
especially viewed with the perspective we have from history and
the lessons summed up from history, on this question of the
nation and on whether or not it is correct to view the working
class as being the inheritors and those best carrying forward
the tradition, the “best” tradition, of the nation.
This question is not completely clear, even in Marx, although
it hardly needs saying, but should be said, just in case what
I’m arguing might lead to any confusion, that Marx and
Engels, both in their summation of the Commune as well as in
their practice around the Commune itself, were obviously
outstanding supporters and promoters of proletarian
internationalism: that’s clear all the way through the
summation of the Commune. Theirs is not a summation done from
the narrow point of view of the French nation, but there is
that confusion.

Returning to a more overall vantage point, it is important
to note that Marx wrote in this very summation that the
proletarians “will have to pass through long struggles,
through a series of historic processes, transforming
circumstances and men”1 and even before that,
20 years earlier in 1851, he had declared “we say to
workers, you will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil
wars and international wars, not only in order to change
existing conditions but also in order to change yourselves and
fit yourselves for the exercise of political
power.”2 This was, again, extremely insightful
on the part of Marx and shows that he didn’t have a
simplistic view of the process of transforming the world and
achieving communism (and certainly the dialectical materialist
method he used in summing up the Commune is not at all a
simplistic one) even though some of the criticisms that I have
just raised are, I think, valid—in terms of his
overestimating, perhaps, the ease with which certain problems
could be dealt with and resolved.

This itself is sort of a unity of opposites: On the one
hand, even in the summation of the Commune as well as more
generally, Marx was aware of the fact—and I think this is
very, very significant, something worth pondering and this ties
in with the “two radical ruptures,” property
relations and ideas—that it’s not enough and
it’s not simply a question of having to go through all
this struggle and turmoil to change existing objective
conditions. He says straight up, you must change
yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of
power. I think that’s a statement that shows a tremendous
historical materialist outlook and method and historical sweep
and this infuses the summation of the Commune. Nevertheless,
what I am saying is that, viewed with historical perspective,
we can see that there was, on the other hand, an
underestimation of the complexity and difficulty of resolving a
lot of these questions—which should not surprise us, but
which needs to be summed up, especially if we are trying to
get, at the same time, a more sweeping and a more particular
view of some of the problems that are involved in advancing
from the bourgeois epoch to the epoch of communism
worldwide.

In general I think this problem is tied in with the fact
that, as much as Marx and Engels did take note of and stand on
the side of the oppressed in China, India and other parts of
the world where the people were rising up against colonial
domination and exploitation, still, largely (and correctly so
from a scientific standpoint and in terms of where the major
and most advanced political movements and struggles were at
that time), they were considering the problem of, particularly
the socialist revolution, the seizure and exercise of
power and transformation of society by the proletariat, in a
European context overwhelmingly—though not exclusively.
Therefore, a lot of the complexity that has now come to
characterize the proletarian revolution and the development of
socialist society and the transformation toward communism in
the world was something which did not fully confront them,
because in fact there has been a shift in the general
historical sense, over a period of time, from West to East of
the focal point of not only revolution in general but even of
proletarian revolution. (This is not to say that there has been
a permanent, unalterable shift—history remains to speak
on how all this will work out—and I’ll return later
to correct and incorrect viewpoints of what the shift I am
referring to implies—but there has been this shift.) And
that has introduced even more complexity into the question of
how to make the transition from the old order, sometimes even
pre-capitalist order predominantly, not to capitalism but
precisely to socialism and on the socialist road toward
communism.

So just to make the point in another way, Marx did not fully
grasp the meaning and implications of even what he himself had
commented on earlier, both at the time of the Commune and 20
years earlier when he talked about the 15, 20 or 50 years of
civil war. We’ve seen it’s been more than 15, 20 or
50 years since then and still this process he’s
describing is only in its infancy in a historical sense. So
it’s not surprising that he did not fully grasp the
meaning and implications of what he himself said about how not
only the changing of conditions but the changing of the
proletarians themselves would have to go on in a historical,
sweeping way before they would be able to be fit to rule, let
alone to carry through the full transition to communism.

And in fact, all this is, in an overall sense, actually a
confirmation of the Marxist theory of knowledge. Because the
primitiveness of many of Marx’s particular observations
reflect the primitiveness, the early stage of development, of
the world historic process of proletarian
revolution—which is not to fall into mechanical
materialism and say that whatever was known was all that could
be known. On the other hand, as should be clear by now, we have
to emphasize again that with all the points that are being
focused on, of how there was primitiveness in Marx’s
observations, there was also a great deal of historical sweep
and farsightedness. But in an overall sense, and viewing it in
that way dialectically, it is a verification and an example of
the Marxist theory of knowledge and the relationship between
practice and theory and the ultimate dependency of theory on
practice, that practice is the ultimate source and point of
determination of theory and of truth. And it does reflect the
primitiveness, the early stage of development of the world
historic process of proletarian revolution toward the long-term
goal of communism. This was, after all, the first practical
experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was a
revolutionary movement of the proletariat still mainly, largely
confined to Europe and stepping on to the stage of history
still wearing much of the costume of the bourgeois republic and
bourgeois democracy out of which it was issuing.

Now it’s interesting in this light to look again at a
commentary on the Paris Commune made by Mao which was referred
to in past reports from the Central Committee, in particular
the one in 1979.3 In particular its very interesting
to examine some points of Mao’s that were not referred to
at that time. If you remember Mao was drawing out the point in
his characteristic way, “If the Paris Commune had not
failed, but had been successful, then in my opinion, it would
have become by now a bourgeois commune. This is because it was
impossible for the French bourgeoisie to allow France’s
working class to have so much political power. This is the case
of the Paris Commune.”4 I can just see Enver
Hoxha and assorted types going wild over that kind of statement
and retorting: “As if the proletariat has to ask the
bourgeoisie for permission to have power.” But in fact
Mao’s is an historical materialist summation and even
though he doesn’t fully develop it, he goes on to talk
about the Soviet Union and how Lenin’s Soviet was
transformed into Khrushchev’s Soviet and begins to draw
together the threads of his analysis of the restoration of
capitalism with the rise to power of the bourgeoisie (this is
in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, when he’s
already made the essentials of that analysis and is beginning
to synthesize some points to a higher level).

He then goes on; this is the part that in the ’79
Report was not quoted but which I think is particularly
important and useful for us to focus on, both because we are
and should be more acutely aware of the problem he is dealing
with and because it will further deepen our own understanding
of the bedrock importance of proletarian internationalism. He
is talking about how the commune in Shanghai is not a viable
form, but that poses a problem because the masses in Shanghai
(despite what is said now) like the Commune so what are we
going to do? It’s a tactical problem because it’s
too advanced a form and we can’t popularize it throughout
the whole country at this time.5 (They did actually
try to implement a lot of the measures of the Paris Commune;
for example, they tried for a while to implement the principle
of appointment and recall of officials by the masses, the
principle of no wages for officials higher than a
worker’s wages, etc., and they had to sum up that they
had to drop back a bit from some of those advanced positions
and consolidate what they could. They basically adopted the
form of the revolutionary committees that had been instituted
elsewhere in the country as organs of power rather than the
commune form. We also refer to this in our article against
Bettelheim in The Communist.)6

The point I want to go into now is not Mao’s summation
that the commune form was not powerful enough a weapon or organ
or form for suppressing counter-revolutionaries in China
itself. But listen to this, it’s very interesting, he
says, “Britain is a monarchy. Doesn’t it have a
king? The U.S. has a presidential system. They are both the
same, being bourgeois dictatorships. The puppet regime of South
Vietnam has a president and bordering it is Sihanouk’s
Royal Kingdom of Cambodia. Which is better? I am afraid
Sihanouk is somewhat better…” He goes back, and
after continuing in this vein for a while, says, “Titles
must not be changed too frequently; we don’t emphasize
names, but emphasize practice; not form, but content. That
fellow Wang Mang of the Han Dynasty, was addicted to changing
names. As soon as he became emperor, he changed all the titles
of government offices, like many of us who have a dislike for
the title ‘chief.’ He also changed the names of all
the counties in the country. This is like our Red Guards who
have changed almost all of the street names of Peking, making
it impossible for us to remember them. We still remember their
former names. It became difficult for Wang Mang to issue edicts
and orders, because the people did not know what changes had
been made. This form of popular drama can be used either by
China or by foreign countries, by the proletariat or by the
bourgeoisie.”7 I remember reading something,
was it PL or it might have been those people COUSML, or
whatever they are calling themselves now, who were seizing on
this saying, “Now this is absolutely outrageous, here is
this Mao hung up on all these names and the formalities of all
this stuff, whether or not he’s going to be recognized by
all these bourgeois countries; how much he’s degenerated
from the revolutionary”… they once pimped off. This
is obviously missing the content for the form, because while
he’s talking about the question of names and all that,
he’s obviously making a point about whether or not that
form—or more fundamentally in another sense the
content—of the Commune, is applicable in the current
conditions of China.

Then he goes on and talks about it in the larger, and for us
right now, more interesting context of a socialist country in a
world where there’s still largely an imperialist
encirclement. He says, “The principal experiences are the
Paris Commune and the Soviet. We can imagine that the name
People’s Republic of China can be used by both classes.
If we should be overthrown and the bourgeoisie came to power
[how far-sighted is this — BA] they would have
no need to change the name but would still call it the
People’s Republic of China. The main thing is which class
seizes political power. This is the fundamental question, not
what its name is.” He goes on: “I think we should
be more stable and should not change all the names. This is
because this would give rise to the question of changing the
political systems, to the question of the state system and to
the question of the name of the country. What would you want to
change [the name] to, The Chinese People’s Commune!
Should the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China
then be called director or commune leader? Not only this
problem but another problem would arise. That is, if there is a
change it’d be followed by the question of recognition or
non-recognition by foreign countries. When the name of a
country is changed, foreign ambassadors will lose their
credentials, new ambassadors will be exchanged and recognition
will be given anew. I surmise that the Soviet Union would not
extend recognition. This is because she would not dare to
recognize, since recognition might cause troubles for the
Soviet. How could there be a Chinese People’s Commune? It
would be rather embarrassing for them but the bourgeois nations
might recognize it.”

So what he’s dealing with is not really the name at
all. He’s saying, “look, we live in a world where
we’re surrounded by imperialism and it’s one thing
to have a People’s Republic but if you try to have a
commune you’re going to run into the problem of the
state, both in terms of internal class enemies and in terms of
the external, the international class enemies, and that’s
too advanced a form, we’ll be crushed.” He says,
“they won’t recognize us,” and so on, but
it’s his own way of getting at a much more profound
problem—and it is obvious if anyone’s a
Marxist-Leninist that what he’s really dealing with is
that question: what form is most appropriate for the class
struggle in China and the suppression of enemies there and the
class struggle internationally?

He then goes on to make a very important point, which I want
to come back to several times here. He says, “If
everything were changed into commune, then what about the
party? Where would we place the party? Among commune committee
members are both party members and non-party members. [Here
he’s talking about the Shanghai Commune —
BA] Where would we place the party committee? There
must be a party somehow! There must be a nucleus, no matter
what we call it. Be it called the Communist party, or social
democratic party, or Kuomintang, or I-kuan-tao, it must have a
party. The commune must have a party, but can the commune
replace the party?”8

Here, obviously he’s dealing with the fact that as
long as there are classes and class struggle, there’s
going to need to be a state and there’s going to need to
be a party. And, he says, “there must be a nucleus no
matter what we call it.” Again he’s getting to the
essence of the matter—there’s still the
contradiction that not everybody’s a communist. When we
get to communism nobody exactly knows how the contradiction
between advanced and backward will exist, but it will. But in
that stage, as we understand it, there will not be the same
kind of need for a party because the meaning of communism is
that there will not be social classes and there will not be the
kind of social divisions there are now, and there will not be a
party to play the vanguard role in that sense—and until
that’s the case we won t have communism. But he’s
saying at this stage we cannot abolish the party, the party is
absolutely essential, just as the state is.

I think it is very interesting to reflect on this. Not only
is he saying—if you take in the whole what I’ve
been pulling snatches from—that the Commune, had it
survived, would have been turned into a bourgeois commune by
now, regardless if it kept the name Commune, but he’s
also saying, if you look at it historically, at least to me
this is the implication we should draw out of it, that not only
with respect to the French bourgeoisie but internationally, the
conditions were such that it was very unlikely that a
proletarian dictatorship could have then existed and survived,
and that the question of a proletarian dictatorship existing
and surviving surrounded by an imperialist world by and large
is an extremely complex and difficult one and cannot be handled
by conservative or by infantile means. It has to be handled by
advancing the class struggle to the maximum degree at every
point and consolidating rather than losing everything at
certain points, in this sort of wave, or, better yet, spiral
development of things. That is what becomes necessary.

So those are a few scattered points on the Paris Commune. In
moving on we can say that Lenin relied to a considerable degree
on Marx and Engels’ summation of the Commune in
formulating his understanding of the dictatorship of the
proletariat as a transition to communism—especially as
the question of seizing power came immediately on the agenda,
that is in Russia itself in 1917—and this is given
concentrated expression in State and Revolution.
There and later also in The Proletarian Revolution and
the Renegade Kautsky, in particular, he speaks correctly
for example of the fact that nowhere in capitalist society is
diplomacy carried out openly in front of the masses and by
involving the masses. It’s always carried out in secret,
through secret treaties, through government appointees and
officials who operate in secret in terms of not sharing their
knowledge openly with the masses. And it is true that when the
Soviet Union was established, when the proletariat came to
power with the Bolsheviks at the head, they did in fact open up
and reveal the secret treaties of the imperialists. In fact
there were even some heroic examples of mass initiative;
untrained sailors, for example, spent sleepless nights on end
figuring out how to decode secret codes so that they could
reveal the machinations of the imperialists to the world. Not
only for the survival of the Soviet Republic, which was very
much bound up with this, but for the general advance of the
struggle internationally. And this they did do, as they said
they would.

But at the same time it has to be summed up that even under
the leadership of Lenin and even when the line was most
revolutionary, they were not able to conduct diplomacy
completely out in the open either; in fact, they were not able
to do so qualitatively more than capitalist states in the
world. A cynic of today reading Lenin on this point would be
able to say, “Ah ha, you haven’t been able to do it
either, so there’s another example of where there’s
not really any difference…” And while that’s
obviously wrong, it is not an insignificant fact that nowhere
in the world up to this point has the proletarian state been
able to carry out diplomacy openly in the main, and, reflecting
back on the Commune, it’s rather obvious that had it
survived, and had to deal with this kind of tense and complex
situation, it would not have been able to do so
either—one could say that with a great deal of
certainty.

It’s also not insignificant, and this is closely
related, that every socialist state so far existing has, and I
believe correctly and out of necessity (unavoidably in other
words), had to maintain a large standing army, separate from
the armed masses as a whole. And this of course relates to what
Lenin, also in State and Revolutionand elsewhere,
emphasizes as one of the touchstone points, one of the
hallmarks of the genuine proletarian dictatorship. What is the
essence of it? That it is ruled by the armed masses themselves.
But, in fact, nowhere has it been yet possible to have rule,
strictly speaking, by the armed masses. It has always been
necessary to have, if you want to put it that way, a
professional army, a separate standing army, an armed body of
men and women separate and in a certain sense above the masses
and this would be true even if the masses were organized
broadly into militias, which has been the case when
there’s been the revolutionary line in command.

Why is this so? As an aside we can refer to the article in
Revolutionmagazine about the Spanish Civil War and
the Spanish revolution9—or the revolution that
was not carried out in Spain. One of the essential things
pointed out was that it became necessary in opposition to some
of the anarcho-syndicalist and other lines to actually
establish a single unified army to actually defeat the
reactionary armed forces (who coalesced and were centered
around Franco). It might have been nice in the abstract, but
not nice in concrete reality, to wish that it would not have to
be the case—but it was. The reason I say “not nice
in reality” is because the tendencies to deny the
necessity or undermine the actual moves toward establishing a
centralized command (in that sense an overall centralized
standing army to fight and defeat the enemy) could only
contribute toward defeat.

Now it’s also true—and this is something that
has many lessons for the Spanish Civil War and for history
generally, and history is also replete with this
lesson—that this is a contradiction that is repeatedly
played on by revisionists and similar bourgeois forces of one
kind or another to, in fact, stifle and suppress the
revolutionary initiative of the masses and to take the
revolution away from them and either drown it in blood and/or
suffocate it in bureaucracy. This is a real contradiction. It
can’t be wished or willed away because it is a
contradiction. It has to be resolved as part of a much larger
process and much more fundamental contradiction.

And here, a recent comment by a leading comrade of our
Central Committee is most relevant. In responding to and as a
retort to the most recent writings of Bettelheim in which
he’s, as it was put, finally “dropped the other
shoe” and come to the conclusion that from the time of
the early ’30s and the consolidation of Stalin’s
leadership, the Soviet Union was capitalist and not socialist,
our comrade pointed out, “If the Commune could be
considered the dictatorship of the proletariat, then the Soviet
Union under Stalin’s leadership can be correctly
considered socialism.” And just to illustrate what is
meant by that, I might add that after all here was the Paris
Commune, a dictatorship of the proletariat with no Marxists!
That is, there was not in any sense a Marxist leadership of the
Commune, and yet it was treated, and correctly so, by Marx as
an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Engels
summed up later and said: if you people who are afraid of
authority and tremble at the words dictatorship of the
proletariat want to know what it is, look at the Paris Commune;
there was the dictatorship of the proletariat. From an overall
historical standpoint, that was a correct and a very important
stand. And the same can be said of the Soviet Union under the
leadership of Stalin (more on that later).

But the immediate point here is that this gives us some
historical perspective and gives us an understanding and
illustrates the need to combine a sweeping historical view with
the rigorous and critical dissecting of especially crucial and
concentrated historical experiences, and to draw out as fully
as possible the lessons and to struggle to forge the lessons as
sharply as possible as weapons for now and for the future. And
here I’m talking specifically about the immediate future,
with the full focus on the conjuncture that is now shaping up.
And this, after all, is the importance of summing up history.
It is important to go deeply into it in its own right and to
explore and dissect it from a critical scientific standpoint.
But ultimately the purpose of that is to advance the overall
revolutionary struggle toward the final goal, and if you lose
sight of that, especially right now in the short term as well
as in the long term, then it turns into academic exercise for
its own sake, then theory degenerates and you become unable to
determine and distinguish correct from incorrect. And this is a
tendency which exists now, around and about, and it’s
important to warn against it.

So that’s a few thoughts on the Paris Commune and
Lenin’s summation of the Paris Commune. Now in terms of
the Soviet Union, having just spoken to that, here I’m
not going to attempt a thorough summation of a number of points
I’m going to raise; but rather, I’m just going to
try to touch on some main points and indicate some main
questions for further study, investigation and struggle. Again,
here is a question which is, especially in the present and
developing situation, in the context of the conjuncture shaping
up, of pressing importance, both in terms of summing up the
crucial, historic lessons and of defeating erroneous and
opportunist positions of various kinds from various directions
on the nature and the role of the Soviet Union in today’s
situation. For example, I’m sure most of you are aware
that the Communist Workers Party has openly reversed itself not
only on the question of China but also on the question of the
Soviet Union; they now say both are socialist; they reversed
themselves, insofar as they ever were stumbling toward at least
aspects of a correct understanding of what socialism is, as
distinguished from capitalism. Now they have comforted
themselves and are attempting to build support among a social
base with the idea that, after all, socialism is attainable
because you can get a subway ride in Moscow for 7 cents. So
both from a sweeping historical standpoint and from the
standpoint of the immediate struggle in the world and the
complexity of it and the many different forces in the field,
it’s crucial to dig more deeply, even more deeply than
we’ve been able to do in the past (although our efforts
have contributed, for example Red
Papers710) and it’s necessary to go
much deeper into some of these crucial questions relating to
the Soviet Union.

I’d like to begin by talking a little about some of
Lenin’s views on the question of the Soviet Union,
particularly in its first desperate years and then as it began
to become clear to him that, for the very immediate future at
least, the Soviet Union was going to have to go it
alone—not in the sense that it had no international ties
or international allies, or wasn’t part of the
international proletariat or had no support, but in the sense
that it was going to be, after all, the only victory of the
proletarian revolution to be consolidated out of the whole
conjuncture which shaped up around and immediately after World
War 1. So, first, some brief examination of some of the key
points of Lenin’s views when he still expected the quick
spread of the revolution, especially in Europe (in particular
Germany), and saw it linking up with the anti-colonial
struggles in the East (though exactly in what form and how
those struggles would be developed toward socialism, was
something about which he was not entirely clear). But, if you
study over not only what was produced by the Communist
International but also Lenin’s own statements and
writings in particular at that time, there was a very definite
tendency towards viewing the development of the world
revolution as, if you want to put it that way, a quantitative
adding on to the existing Soviet Republic in Russia, that is,
there would be development from that republic, almost literally
and geographically, to a world soviet republic.

Now this, it must be clearly said, was not a question of
chauvinism, because Lenin fought tooth and nail within the
confines of the existing Soviet Republic, as well as
internationally, against chauvinism, against chauvinist
deviations and for genuine equality between nations, and for
the unity of the international proletariat toward communism.
Rather, it was a question of seeing the development and the
rapid spread of the proletarian revolution to many parts of the
world as being much more imminent than, unfortunately, it
turned out to be. Though it was a mistaken view, its positive
aspect—and this is something I want to reiterate
later—was a great deal of impatience in trying, as the
same leading comrade of ours referred to earlier said, to
squeeze everything possible out of that conjuncture.

Now in this context I think it’s important, and
it’s only in this context that I think it can actually be
correctly evaluated, to look at Lenin’s work
Left-Wing Communisma little bit, in other words,
no more than the few very brief and scattered remarks that I
made on Marx’s The Civil War in France, the
summation of the Commune. I’m not going to attempt to
make any kind of thorough summation of Left-Wing
Communismbut rather to make a few points to be part of a
deeper summation of Left-Wing Communismin the
context of the larger questions being touched on here.

I think it has to be said, first of all, that in re-reading
it recently I was struck by the fact that overall it’s a
very important work, particularly in the context of ripening
possibilities for revolution. It is rich in many important
lessons and principles that have to be grasped and applied
correctly, and in a genuinely creative way—that is, a
Marxist-Leninist sense of creative, not a revisionist,
Khrushchevian sense of creative which as someone pointed out,
is the view that it’s alright to “creatively
develop” Marxism-Leninism by discarding any of the
principles that are uncomfortable to revisionists, but if you
actually try to take the principles that have been forged and
develop them through application to the present situation then
you’re a dogmatist and “how dare you-ist.”
But looking at Left-Wing CommunismI was struck by
the fact that there are many basic principles and lessons that
are not only correct in the general sense but crucial,
especially in the context of an approaching and developing
revolutionary situation.

What Lenin is trying to call attention to and trying to
focus on explicitly in this work is how to make the transition
from the more normal kind of situation to the full development
of a revolutionary struggle in the circumstances where a
revolutionary situation is ripening but the masses have not yet
come over to the revolutionary position. This, in an overall
sense, is the problem Lenin is grappling with, but a number of
points have to be made in this connection. First of all, it has
to be understood in the context precisely of such a situation
and of such a conjuncture—if not an historic conjuncture
on a world scale, at least a conjuncture in the more limited
sense of the sharpening up toward and the development of a
revolutionary situation. And, it has to be said that these
attempts to make the maximum gains possible infuse the overall
thrust of this work. This is generally what is correct in
Left-Wing Communismand it is based on certain
expectations. But some points and approaches and even certain
questions of method were wrong, even given the situation,
reflecting on the one hand a certain lack of understanding of
some of the concrete situations on the part of Lenin, but on
the other hand going so far or trying so hard to take the
lessons of the successful revolution in Russia and apply them
to other circumstances in the crush and crunch of this still
sharpening situation—to “squeeze as much as
possible out of that conjuncture” (to use that very
descriptive phrase)—that certain errors were actually
made by Lenin, and in certain instances in any case, things
begin to turn somewhat into their opposite in terms of tactics
he urged.

For example, let’s take the case of England which is
the subject of a chapter in Left-Wing Communism.
Lenin talks about the formation of the British Communist Party
which is still in its infant stages (in fact the party had not
yet been formed) and the whole question of the Labor Party, the
fact that a lot of the liberals are gravitating toward the
Labor Party, that things are polarizing with the question of
the Labor Party and its phony socialist leaders coming to the
fore. He’s drawing from the experiences of the Russian
Revolution—whose particulars were unfortunately lost
sight of in this instance—and drawing the general lesson
concentrated in the famous phrase that everyone who’s
been around long enough to talk to the right-wingers in the
movement has heard about supporting the Labor Party like a rope
supports a hanging man: Force them to take power, because they
don’t want to take power, while maintaining your
independent stand and your right to criticize, and when the
masses all desert them as they see that the Laborites will not
in fact implement socialism, they will come over to the
communists and a revolutionary position. Well, some tactics of
that kind were in fact correctly employed in the Russian
revolution vis-á-vis the Mensheviks, the
Socialist Revolutionaries and other forces who at one time or
another or in one situation or another had the allegiance of
crucial sections of the masses—for example the workers in
the Soviets and the peasantry. But with regard to Merry Old
England, with its long tradition of corruption and
bourgeoisification of the working class which, along with its
whole bourgeois parliamentary tradition, Lenin was well aware
of, the situation was different.

You know Stalin once said in Marxism and the National
Question that “In Russia, there is no parliament,
thank God.”11 (I was never exactly clear who
was saying “thank God,” since Stalin put this in
quotes, but I always thought it was Stalin.) But anyway there
is a point there that if you have those parliaments for a long
time and you begin to get workers’ deputies it becomes a
millstone around the neck of the proletariat and of the
revolutionary movement. It really is sort of a “thank
god” situation if you don’t have a parliament most
of the time. In Russia the parliament (or the Duma) was a
concession wrung out of the ruling classes and the Tsar in
particular at certain crucial periods of upsurge and ripening
of a revolutionary situation. It didn’t really have time
to be taken over and utilized by the ruling classes for the
purpose of stupefying, and lulling and corrupting and corroding
the outlook and tenseness of the masses. They always had this
in mind, but they didn’t have the time the British
bourgeoisie had to perfect it as a means of stupefying the
masses.

In Britain that parliament went along with the whole
bourgeoisification of the proletariat and unfortunately it
turned out to be the case, insofar as and to the degree that
attempts were made to apply what Lenin says there (and in my
opinion it could not have been otherwise in following such
tactics), that confusion and disorientation set in,
particularly among the advanced sections of the proletariat.
Because it was not the same situation as Russia, it was not a
case that parliament came into being right at those times or
where, because of revolutionary upsurges these were new
opportunities, or in any case, new necessity in regard to the
parliament. In fact, while there was a revolutionary mood of a
kind, a rebelliousness in England in the aftermath of the war,
there was not the same kind of bringing to a head of
the contradictions and the development of a revolutionary
situation as there had been in Russia just before.

Frankly, there is a certain bourgeois logic to Lenin’s
argument here. He even goes so far as to say at one point, that
if you support Henderson and Snowden (who were the leaders of
the phony socialist Labor Party) and if they gain the victory
over Lloyd George and Churchill, then the majority of workers
will, in a brief space of time, become disappointed in their
leaders and come over to support the communists. Lenin says,
and here’s where I think bourgeois logic begins to assert
itself and even a certain amount of opportunism frankly,
“If I come out as a communist and call upon the workers
to vote for Henderson against Lloyd George they [the workers
— BA] will certainly give me a
hearing.”12 Well, they may or they may not,
but that’s not the question—that may be a tactical
consideration, but it has to be based on something more
fundamental. Lenin here is basing his argument on an erroneous
assessment, and here is where he was trying so hard that he
fell over backward, that’s the only way I can put it,
because he is not unaware of some of the points that I’ve
been discussing, he reflects to a certain degree here an
understanding of the role that parliamentarism has played in
the British working class and in British society. In fact, he
even says to the effect that exactly because of the history of
parliamentarism, it’s all the more necessary to carry out
the parliamentary form of struggle in Great Britain—and I
think that is wrong, bourgeois logic and trying so hard that he
fell over backward.

Now these errors might not be so important if
everybody—and I mean the leaders of the international
communist movement and down to all the modern-day revisionists
of various kinds almost without exception—hadn’t
insisted on reprinting and disseminating Left-Wing
Communism as “the great work of strategy and
tactics” which must be applied to the letter, and if it
hadn’t been used, as it has been used by such types, as a
recipe everywhere for revisionism, and if it hadn’t in
fact been made front and center while What Is To Be
Done? was largely buried or distorted in its meaning.
But unfortunately, Left-Wing Communism has been
seized on to promote revisionism, and the kind of mistakes in
it that I’ve pointed to are given concentrated attention
and expression at the same time that the correct things about
it, which are the essence and main aspect of it, are taken out
of context and turned into a recipe for revisionism, for
economism, parliamentary cretinism, tailism and being the tail
on the bourgeoisie generally. Everyone that’s ever been
in the movement and around these various forces more than a few
months has been smacked in the face with quotations from and
references to Left-Wing Communism in this kind of
way, and it’s time to sum this up correctly and uphold
what’s correct and say we have a few criticisms, on the
other hand, to make about this—which are what I’ve
just summarized.

In general we could say that some things that did apply then
or mainly applied then and/or reflected errors to a certain
degree, even if secondarily, have been carried along and built
up as articles of faith and become in fact articles of faith of
revisionism, for example, the emphasis on trade unions and work
in them, which can also be found in Left-Wing
Communism. It’s not that Lenin does not recognize
the limitations and shortcomings of trade unions, and certainly
of trade unionism, and that he doesn’t recognize the fact
that in large part, especially in the West, the unions are
controlled by outright reactionaries, not mere reformists. But
there is a certain orientation that the trade unions,
especially in the West, are, after all, the key mass
organizations of the proletariat and that it is necessary to
work in and win the trade unions to the cause of socialism. To
the degree that this represented truth or much more of the
truth at the time of Left-Wing Communism, at this
stage of the proletarian struggle and of the situation of the
working class in the advanced capitalist countries in
particular, it certainly needs to be looked at critically and
afresh now, as we and some others have begun doing.

So that’s just some brief remarks on some points
having to do with Lenin’s views when he still expected
the rather immediate victory or spread of the proletarian
revolution to other parts of Europe, in particular Germany, and
also the linking up with the anti-colonial struggle in the
East. But then it began to become clear that the revolution in
the West, in particular and above all in Germany, had been
delayed, and probably would be delayed for a while, in fact
longer than had been anticipated earlier by Lenin and others.
Lenin certainly continued to view things in terms of, and to
base himself strategically on, the world revolution and,
further, he insightfully recognized the beginning developments
toward the shifting of the focal point of revolution more and
more to the East, which has been an undeniable phenomenon since
Lenin’s time. Lenin was not, however, being one-sided
about this or adopting a “third worldist” position,
that is, writing off revolution in the West or seeing the only
possible thrust of revolution coming from the East or
suggesting that revolution in the West would only be possible
after the flame of revolution had lit up the entire East (and
then perhaps things would develop in the West to where a
proletarian revolution could become possible). This was
not Lenin’s view and when it is attributed to
him represents a vulgarization of his actual view, although he
did correctly recognize the developments which were really only
beginning to assert themselves, that is, the shift of the
revolutionary center more and more toward the East.

Now in this light it’s interesting to look at one of
Lenin’s last attempts, in the essay “Better Fewer,
But Better,”13 particularly the last part, to
grapple with the question of what are they going to do given
the fact—this is in 1923—that revolution in the
West and Germany in particular is not going to succeed quickly
and come immediately to the aid of the Bolshevik Revolution.
It’s very obvious in reading that he really is grappling
with this question without having forged or synthesized a
thoroughly consistent program, and he’s already right up
against some of the problems of the proletarian movement in the
West. For example, in the Communist International one of the
main leaders of German communism (so-called) wants to have a
proviso that they can assure the workers in Germany that if
there’s a revolution their wages won’t be lowered.
Well, this certainly helps Lenin to begin realizing some of
these problems—you know it’s not that much
different than a lot of people nowadays. Lenin had begun to
come up against the fact that they were going to be going it
alone, perhaps not for decades, but for a period of time.
Previously, the idea that revolution in the West, and Germany
in particular, was going to immediately come to their aid was
always the expectation of Lenin, and that’s something we
have to grasp. It wasn’t only the Trotskyites who had the
orientation that the revolution in Russia needed to and would
have the revolution in the more advanced counties and in
particular Germany come to its aid if not to its
rescue—perhaps “rescue” is too strong a term
and does fit more the Trotskyite view—would come to its
aid and that in turn they would seize power in Russia and that
would be the spark to proletarian revolution in the West, and
as power was captured in the West that would be the ground on
which they would have a viable basis to build socialism and to
carry forward toward the world soviet republic. This was
Lenin’s idea until it clearly had to be summed up that
this was no longer an immediate prospect.

Now Lenin was, and I’ll come back to what it’s
in opposition to a little bit later, willing to put the Soviet
revolution on the line and risk it in the short run for the
victory of revolution in Germany and other parts of the world,
in particular other parts of Europe which he saw as most
strategic, correctly so at that time, immediately coming out of
World War 1. He was willing to do it. During the latter part of
1918 and 1919, with revolutionary stirrings and uprisings
spreading in Central Europe, Lenin repeatedly underscored the
necessity of assisting these struggles to the maximum,
including by force of arms and troops. In fact, in 1920 the Red
Army drove on Warsaw (though it was later repulsed) and this
was clearly linked with creating more favorable conditions for
the German revolution. Again this orientation was not based on
a sort of Trotskyite fatalism—that all was lost unless
revolution occurred in the advanced countries—but grew
out of the recognition that this was indeed the responsibility
of the proletariat in power and would lay the most solid basis
to build socialism in the Soviet Union. Lenin was perfectly
willing (as opposed to the idea that you can’t export
revolution) to export revolution, but he wanted to make sure
that there would be somebody to use it if he exported it. In
the conditions of the ’20s, he summed up that,
unfortunately, there would not be yet. This is something that
has also been lost sight of to a large degree since
Lenin’s time, and things have gone too far in the
direction of promising the bourgeoisie in power that we
won’t export revolution to their countries. It’s
not as easy to uphold that principle when you’re actually
faced with the necessity of maintaining power and advancing in
a particular country, but, nevertheless, it has to be
upheld.

But getting back to “Better Fewer, But Better,”
one of a number of things which I think are of long-term
importance in trying to understand this problem more deeply,
again especially if you look over the last section of that
essay, is that there is an overemphasis and a general
identification of industrialization and the predominance of
industry in the country with socialism. This is a theme also
found in other well-known and not only important but inspiring
works by Lenin (for example, in “A Great
Beginning,”14 which was written a couple years
earlier, in 1919). Now you have to be careful in making this
criticism because Lenin did say “in the final
analysis” and “in the long run.” And of
course it is true that you can’t conceive of socialism
triumphing and winning complete victory on the basis of
backward, even pre-capitalist agrarian production as the main
form of production. But there was a little bit too much the
tendency toward one-to-one identification of industrialization,
the dominance of industry over agriculture, with
socialism—in other words, the idea, looking at it from
the other side, that without the dominance of industry
socialism was not viable, and this view was in general currency
in the socialist and communist movement. And while it’s
true in the long-term, there’s a lot that we’ve
found out that goes on between here and the long term.

At the same time and related to this is the question of the
peasantry. Now because of the way in which the Russian
revolution developed, as opposed to, for example, the Chinese
revolution, there really was not the long-term and deep-going
planting of roots in the countryside in Russia, although there
was in the context of the 1905 revolution and again during the
war, particularly with the peasants in uniform and in the
upsurges and the victories of the 1917 revolution, the
phenomenon, as Lenin commented on, of revolutionary workers
going back to the villages they’d come from or going out
to the villages generally and doing revolutionary work among
the peasantry and linking up with the peasant uprisings. But
there was not this long-term deep-going planting of roots among
the peasantry that necessarily went on in the Chinese
revolution because it was not correct to center that revolution
in the countryside in Russia, as proved to be correct and
necessary in China. Lenin’s attitude toward the peasantry
which he was very open about, was one of trying—and we
can use the phrase in a political sense—to “learn
warfare by making warfare.” For example, on the eve of
October as they were seizing power, he devoted himself to
assiduously, vigorously and rigorously studying the literature
of the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had a base among the
peasantry, and ended up adopting their program to win over the
peasantry—but it was a very quick and concerted effort to
come to know the peasantry in a very concentrated way, and to
win it over in a very concentrated way.

So, this problem with the peasantry is not surprising given
that the Bolsheviks had not expected a revolution in Russia
necessarily to come first or, even if it came first, to come
and then be on its own without the aid of the simultaneous or
quickly-following revolution in the West. They had not devoted
the attention to the peasant question which they were later
forced to devote once they were confronted with the actual
situation of hanging on to power and attempting not only to win
a civil war and at the same time defeat foreign intervention,
but to consolidate and begin to rebuild the economy and head
out on the socialist road. Lenin studied the peasant question
vigorously and certainly recognized the importance of it and
the need to win the peasantry. He studied the experience of
cooperatives and stressed, for example, the qualitative
difference in the role that cooperatives—and he’s
talking in particular about cooperatives in trade more than
cooperatives in production in these early years—could
play in being a sort of transition, under the proletarian
dictatorship, toward socialist economy in the countryside and
in the country overall. But with all that he didn’t work
out a complete policy on the question of the peasantry and how
the peasant question would figure into the overall socialist
transformation, and to a certain degree this is based on the
factors that I discussed earlier about the nature and
expectations of the Russian revolution and the Russian
revolutionaries and, to a certain degree, on this notion of the
identification of industrialization and the predominance of
industry over agriculture as being an essential of
socialism.

Now it’s true that Lenin argued against the theory of
the productive forces and in particular against the Mensheviks,
Kautskyites and so on who were making the traditional argument
that it was impossible to have socialism in Russia because it
was too backward and you have to have the necessary level of
technique of civilization—in the sense of productive
forces and science—before socialism is possible. And
Lenin in “Our Revolution”15 takes them
on and says, “Well, okay, but why can’t we first
seize power and then create the civilization; where in your
dusty books does it say that we have to do it the other
way?” And I’m sure he was fully prepared, even if
they found the quotation, to say that they weren’t going
to do it that way in any case, that if they had a chance to
seize power, they would and then go about solving that
problem—which was the Leninist and correct Marxist
orientation.

But even here—in rereading it I was struck by
this—it’s clear that he’s refuting them but
also accepting a certain amount of their terms. He’s
saying, “Well, okay, so you do have to have a certain
level of civilization,” then he puts in parenthesis, and
this is important, “although nobody can say just what
that level is” which is also a refutation on a more
profound level, it’s a dialectical statement as opposed
to mechanical materialism; he’s saying. “Well, yes,
it’s true but let’s not get too mechanical and too
absolute about it.” But at the same time, he is, to a
certain degree, saying, “Okay, well and good, but why
can’t we first seize power and then outdo the
capitalist countries and capitalism in general in creating a
higher level of technique and (in that sense)
civilization.” And it’s not by any means that Lenin
had the view of the revisionists because this was exactly in
refutation of them as their views posed themselves sharply at
that time. But in scrounging around and looking for things in
Lenin to justify themselves, it is not that the revisionists,
the Chinese revisionists, for example, right after seizing
power, were without anything to pull out of Lenin to marshal as
evidence for their line of putting emphasis on production,
technique, and out-producing the advanced capitalist countries
as the guarantee against restoration.

At the same time Lenin, both in the essay, “Better
Fewer, But Better,” and in general during this period of
the last few years of his life did put a lot of emphasis on the
necessity, and correctly so, of making use of rifts among the
imperialists, because he correctly recognized that this was a
life-and-death struggle and gave concrete leadership. It
wasn’t a question of principle in the abstract, but
upholding principle while at the same time having that
principle be applied in practice, because the principle without
the practice degenerates as a principle and also has no
effect—at least no positive effect. This should not be a
way of saying: who cares, principle, schminciple, the only
thing is practice, in the narrow sense. It’s a question
of the synthesis of the two, of winning the masses, a question
of actually seizing power, making revolution and transforming
society; that’s the ultimate test and Lenin treated it as
the ultimate test. He treated it as a test and he also
treated it ultimately, and not narrowly in an empiricist or
mechanical revisionist way, but as we said in our last Central
Committee report, he was interested in winning and this we
should learn from him. In this context he grappled with the
question of how to make use of the rifts among the
imperialists, but he saw this and put this in the context of
the expectation, if not immediately, still fairly soon, of an
upsurge in the world revolution and, if you want to put it this
way, he saw it more in terms of “marking time”
until there was another upsurge in the world revolution, than a
long-term strategic policy of making use of these rifts.

Now along with this, his analysis of world forces, for
example at the Second Congress of the Communist International,
in terms of states and peoples and classes has also been seized
on by the Chinese revisionists of late. They say, for example
in Peking Review No. 45 from 1977, their major
theoretical statement on the “three worlds” theory,
something like, well, Lenin had his own version of the
“three worlds.” At that time he divided the world
into three, too. What should we learn from Lenin? We should
learn to divide the world into three. But, there is an element
of truth in that if you read the essay they’re referring
to, Lenin did say that among the victor imperialist states
there are the ones that won big; there are the ones that
didn’t win so big; then, finally, there’s Germany
which got creamed, there’s us that made revolution and
all the colonial and dependent peoples. He did make an analysis
like that—not, however, to figure out which bourgeoisies
it was best to suck up to, but how to make use of
contradictions among them and, even more strategically and
fundamentally, where to expect and where to concentrate work to
develop a revolutionary upsurge in the next period. But, again,
it’s not that the Chinese revisionists, in scrounging
around and looking for a Leninist cover—to the degree
they want any (and that’s decreasingly so) for their
reactionary and counter-revolutionary international line as
formulated, at least heretofore, in the “three
worlds” theory, it’s not that they can’t find
any elements of that in Lenin. Of course, as Lenin himself once
said, you can always find any quote out of context to justify
anything, which is one of the things that makes life so
frustrating. But these are some problems, we are not simply
dealing with distortion, there are some things certain elements
which begin showing up, that can be marshalled for wrong
arguments.

In a certain way a salient example of this is the policy
that was applied towards Germany in the early years of the
Soviet Republic. It was in general a correct policy, that is,
the Bolsheviks recognized that Germany had to seek friends in
funny places, strange places because of its defeated status and
the way it was being pounced on by the other imperialists to
get the spoils of the victory (from having put down
Germany’s attempt to redivide the world in its favor and
having redivided it in their own favor). Germany was open to
and had the necessity, just as the Soviet Republic did from a
qualitatively different position of forming some kind of
agreements and alliances. These were, for example, agreements
in the military sphere: Germany wasn’t allowed by the
allies to have armies so it basically trained the core of the
leadership of its army and developed a lot of its weaponry in
Russia while the Russians learned some of the same things
building up their army, all of which was necessary and correct
in that sense. But what began to creep in already, and what is
troublesome and what has to be summed up for its key lessons,
is that there was a tendency—which would develop much
more fully later and turn into or toward an antagonism—to
not correctly handle, and in a certain way to even deny the
existence of, the contradiction between the state interests, if
you want to put it that way, of the proletariat in power and
the overall world revolutionary interests of the international
proletariat.

Here I just want to point out that the worst thing of all in
this regard is to think that the two are not in contradiction
and in fact became one and the same. This became a little bit
the current—and more than a small trickle, but a regular
current—in Soviet policy at the time. It’s not that
they wrote off revolution in Germany, far from it, especially
in the late teens and the first years of the twenties;
it’s that the idea of the two being the same began to
creep in as justification for what they were doing, when it
should have been justified simply on the basis that it was
necessary and wasn’t, in and of itself, harmful to the
revolution in Germany or world revolution for Soviet Russia to
have those dealings with Germany. In other words what I have
been describing became part of the notion that by doing this
and by dealing with Germany the influence of the Russian
revolution will be spread and it will make the work to build
revolution in Germany easier. Well, while that is an aspect of
the situation, there is an aspect of truth to that, in fact
it’s the secondary aspect. It’s not a question of
infantile-ism and refusing to have such relations out of
pristine purity; nevertheless it must be recognized that
there’s a certain legitimacy being bestowed upon, or a
certain confusion being furthered about, the nature of that
regime in Germany. But that’s not even the most important
point: so what, in a certain sense, because the communists have
the task and the possibility to do their exposure and carry out
the kind of work to overcome what problems that might pose.
It’s the same situation that was posed in another
context, in another way, with the opening to the West of China
in the ’70s. As for revolutionaries in the West, some
handled it fairly well and learned to handle it better, and
some learned how to ride the circuit back and forth to Peking
and degenerated. The same problem was posing itself at that
time—the early, desperate years of the Soviet
Republic.

To think that somehow what is in fact a contradiction and
therefore has the potential, if not correctly handled, to
become antagonistic is not a contradiction to think
that the state needs of the proletariat in power, if you want
to put it that way, the need for the proletariat in power in
Russia to make use of rifts among the imperialists in order to
maintain power on the one hand, and the interests of the
international proletariat, as represented in its need to win
power in Germany, on the other hand, are one and the same, is
the worst of all things. That is when it really begins to turn
into its opposite because then the revolutionary edge is not
only blunted but begins to become destroyed, and you begin to
think that you can somehow ride the coattails of the authority
and influence and respectability that’s being earned by
the diplomacy of the socialist state. On the other hand, it is
a fact that there will also be a tendency among the diplomats
and, overall, the political leaders in this socialist state to
want to cool down revolutionary sentiments and revolutionary
developments in the country with which they are of necessity
(and even out of desperate necessity) carrying out these
diplomatic arrangements and agreements, because revolution
doesn’t come such that one day you’re doing
diplomacy and the next day you wake up and you can have a
revolution. It goes through a series of developments—back
and forth, twists and turns—and through all that the two,
the diplomacy and the state needs as I’ve defined them,
on the one hand, and the development toward a revolution on the
other, come frequently into very sharp contradiction.

Now just in passing, one thing that should be said is that
in Lenin himself, and not simply later in the Soviet Party and
the international movement, there is a wrong view, a view
contrary to a certain degree to Leninism, in fact, on the
question of the Versailles Treaty and how to deal with it in
Germany, which is not totally unconnected with these things
I’ve been discussing. Earlier Lenin took and fought for a
basically correct position, for example in Left-Wing
Communism, on the question of the Versailles Treaty
where he said that on the basis of internationalism German
communists should not put themselves in a position of allowing
the bourgeoisie to corner them into coming out and saying
they’re against the Versailles Treaty and should
determine their attitude toward the Versailles Treaty on the
basis of the interests of the international proletariat and the
world revolution. But then there begins to creep in the view,
even somewhat appearing in Lenin and certainly carried forward
after him, of pushing the communists in Germany a little
bit—and this is not accidental and ties in somewhat with
his sort of early and partial analysis of the three parts of
the world, if you will—to raise the national banner in
Germany against the Versailles Treaty and against the
victors’ feast at the expense of Germany.

Now I have put this view out a number of times in the past
to different people and I’ll just repeat it again: I
never could understand why, when you’re talking about
imperialists and if you’re in an imperialist
country, the mere fact that it’s a loser or has been
knocked down to second rate should make you the big partisan of
defending the fatherland. In other words, the view that,
“Well, my imperialists got whipped so now it’s okay
for me to defend the fatherland,” is something I
can’t quite grasp the correctness of from a Marxist-
Leninist standpoint. And I say a Marxist-Leninist
standpoint even if Lenin fell into it to a certain degree,
because there is Lenin ism and there is Lenin, just as
there is (even though the Chinese revisionists have said it)
Mao Tsetung Thought and then there’s Mao Tsetung and the
two are not necessarily the same on every point. It isn’t
always the case that Mao upheld Mao Tsetung
Thought—though where we think he deviated from it
certainly would be the opposite of where the Chinese
revisionists would think so. And the same for Leninism: every
act of Lenin is not necessarily Leninism. But there is
Leninism, all the same. And I think this is an important
point—this idea that begins to creep in, that if your
imperialist comes out the loser then it’s okay to support
it: “after all, we’re just second-rate imperialists
here, we only got a little chunk of Africa or all we got is a
little island here or there and we’re the underdog;
therefore, why can’t we support the fatherland and see if
we can get more; then, if we get more, everybody can oppose
us.” What kind of logic that is doesn’t need
saying.

The important point to grasp is that there really is a
problem or contradiction that has to be grasped deeply and in
an all-around way. It can’t be avoided or brushed aside
or answered as one Menshevik who was in our Party—and we
know how deep and sincere this was—tried to brush aside
the question, before China went revisionist, of what will we do
in the next world war, what stand are we going to take
including if China’s attacked by the Soviet Union? After
some go-around and discussion—and I must say this was at
a Central Committee meeting—he just said, wanting to
waive all discussion, “Well, what’s the big
problem, they’ll go to war, we’ll carry out
revolutionary defeatism and overthrow our bourgeoisie…so
let’s move the agenda.” Well, unfortunately, the
world’s not that simple and we know where the people that
wanted to move the agenda in that way moved their agenda to.
[This refers to a group of revisionists, dubbed
“Mensheviks,” who sided with the revisionist coup
in China and split from the RCP, USA in 1977.] And there is a
problem, a contradiction that has to be grasped deeply and in
an all-around way. The world, including the situation of the
proletariat, really is different when the proletariat seizes,
and particularly if it holds power in one or a few
countries.

And this is a point to be returned to somewhat in the
context of the remarks I’m going to make today, but
it’s also something that obviously needs to be delved
into, dug into, reflected on, grappled with and struggled over
much more fully and in an all-around way within the whole
international communist movement. For example, I was in one
discussion with someone who pointed out. “Well, the
position of the proletariat is that it has nothing to lose but
its chains, but if it has a country does it have nothing to
lose but its chains?” There is a problem to think about,
and to think that there’s no contradiction between a
proletariat having state power and the advance of world
revolution means that you can only incorrectly handle what is a
very profound and, at times, extremely acute and potentially
antagonistic contradiction.

Just to finish up on this aspect of the commentary on some
of Lenin’s views: Lenin died, as we know, before the
fuller development of these contradictions. He died without
ever coming fully to grips, without facing in the fullest sense
nor obviously finding a basic resolution to these
contradictions in a period of growing turmoil. He had of course
been basically unable to function politically to any
significant degree for the last couple of years before his
death and then, especially with his death, there was a
tremendous line struggle that went on inside the Soviet Party.
I’m not going to even attempt to try to get into much of
that now, it’s something that also has to be studied and
summed up and struggled over much more deeply. But, without
repeating everything that’s said in the last Central
Committee Report in the document “For Decades to Come on
a World Scale,”16 (the part in particular
“Outline of Views on the Historical Experience of the
International Communist Movement and the Lessons for
Today”) where evaluation is made of Stalin, it is a fact
of history that at that juncture after the death of Lenin, and
when the question was very sharply posed of what road to take
in the Soviet Republic at that time and the question of whether
in fact the socialist road could be embarked on and, if not
what must be done, basically, and in the main, Stalin
represented the most correct and principally the correct
position at that time. This was so in general, but especially
as against the position of Trotsky, Bukharin, et al.
who either openly or in a “left” form counselled
and fought for capitulation to the bourgeoisie and reactionary
class forces in Russia and internationally.

But having said that the essential question was whether or
not it was possible to have socialism in one country—the
debate over which, in one sense we’re all familiar
with—it’s necessary to say, immediately and on the
other hand, that to a large degree the question was being
begged. I say the question was begged to a certain degree,
that is the question of socialism in one country, since much of
it hinges on what in fact is socialism.

And again, the point has to be stressed that Trotsky,
Bukharin, et al. were fundamentally wrong and were
either in a “left” or openly right form advocating
capitulation. But that also does not exhaust the question and
isn’t the most profound or the highest level of
understanding that can be achieved around this question, as
experience and the theoretical and ideological struggle based
on that experience has shown. And out of all this has been
forged and is continuing to be forged more deeply a more
correct understanding on this question.

To put it this way, Stalin saw and presented socialism as
the elimination of classes, or at least antagonistic classes.
Now this definition isn’t some capricious invention of
his, it was in fact the more or less accepted view of
socialism, including, by and large, on Lenin’s part. We
have to understand that it’s not so much that later on
Stalin invented a new definition of socialism, this was the
definition, and when Stalin talked about socialism in one
country he was talking about the elimination of classes, or
antagonistic classes in any case—it’s not just that
later when he said we have socialism and said at the same time
that antagonistic classes had been eliminated that somehow he
had smuggled in a new deviation from what had been the accepted
Marxist-Leninist view up to that point.

And this, ironically, has been somewhat obscured since the
leader who had led the way in forging a higher, and the
highest, understanding of this up to this point has been Mao.
Mao was in fact a continuator of the experience of the Soviet
revolution and of the building of socialism in the Soviet
Union, even though he looked deeply into and set about
attempting to sum up deeply and to correct a lot of the errors
that were contained in the Soviet experience and the leadership
particularly by Stalin, of the dictatorship of the proletariat
and the socialist transformation in the Soviet Union as far as
it went. Mao went deeply into some of the errors, especially as
it became clear that capitalism had been restored in the Soviet
Union under the leadership of Khrushchev; he dug deeply into
this whole experience and brought into light and focused on a
lot of errors that had been made in the way that the question
of classes and class struggle was handled or was not recognized
and was not correctly handled under socialism after a certain
point. But at the same time Mao was in fact (and correctly) a
continuator of the experience that was first initiated with the
seizure of power with the Russian revolution and the beginning
of the socialist transformation and the embarking on the
socialist road in Russia. So the way that all this has come to
us has been in the tradition and carrying forward the legacy of
Mao.

To put it another way, we read back into history by first
becoming familiar with Mao’s summation of what socialism
is—that there are classes and class struggle and
that’s the central question under socialism—and
with his criticism, therefore, of Stalin’s erroneous
analysis of how classes (or at least antagonistic classes) had
been eliminated with the achievement of basic socialist
ownership and the elimination of private ownership in the old
forms. And so it appears, perhaps that Stalin was deviating
from the previously accepted notions or norms of
Marxism-Leninism by saying that the bourgeoisie had been
eliminated when that was actually more of a continuation of the
tradition and not a deviation on Stalin’s part. Mao in
fact was making a leap beyond and to a certain extent away from
that—a radical rupture beyond it—on the same road
as a continuator of that same historical experience—but a
leap beyond and in that sense away from it (though not,
certainly, a reversal of it). Stalin presented socialism as the
elimination of antagonistic classes, and it’s this that
he said was possible in one country. And we have to say with
historical perspective—Mao’s contributions and
what’s been learned by forging ahead on that road by
continuing in the direction pointed by Mao—that this
notion of socialism, and particularly in the way Stalin
presented it, was linked to his mechanical materialist and
general metaphysical tendencies, that is, not simply the view
that socialism meant the elimination of classes but how Stalin
saw that elimination of classes coming about and how he
presented the socialist transformation, about which I’ll
say a few points briefly.

But first, just a side point: if it can be said that Lenin
recognized, in a certain sense, the contradiction involved in
keeping power and maintaining the proletarian dictatorship in
one country while attempting to jockey and maneuver until
reserves came forward in the other parts of the world for the
world revolution and if, on the other hand, he tended to see
the world revolution in a certain sense as the extension,
almost literally and geographically, of the first existing
Soviet Republic, and in that context saw the Soviet Republic as
the temporary center of sorts from which the world revolution
would expand outward or to which, from other parts of the
world, there would be added additional Soviet republics; it has
to be said that with the further development of the Soviet
Union, of the beginning of the socialist transformation in the
Soviet Union with the leadership of Stalin, this erroneous idea
became more pronounced, while at the same time the fact that
things would not develop that way became more pronounced. And,
at the same time the tendency to say that there was an absolute
identity of interests between the Soviet Republic as a
proletarian state and the overall advance of world revolution
became more pronounced, more marked and tended to a large
degree, particularly in the late ’30s, to turn rather
sharply towards and into its opposite.

Now, what strikes me in recently re-reading the major
documents at the time of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in
1928 is that, on the one hand, there is a general overall
revolutionary framework and a definite revolutionary thrust to
the overall proceedings and line of the Congress, there is a
real grappling and attempt to come to terms with the question
of how to make revolution in both the advanced capitalist
countries and the colonial and dependent and backward
countries. On the other hand, it’s marred by a great deal
of economist tendencies and mechanical materialism which show
up much more strongly later. Perhaps it’s an irony of
history, but we could say with a certain amount of historical
perspective, that in a certain sense, and this is somewhat
pointed to in that outline at the last Central Committee, while
they correctly predicted at the Congress—and in general
the communist movement and the Soviet leadership were
predicting—the breakdown and the end of the temporary
stabilization and expansion that the capitalist countries
experienced in the ’20s, it was not entirely for the
correct reasons. Their prediction was borne out but that
divided very sharply into two because a lot of the basis on
which they were predicting it had to do with erroneous notions
that were tied up with the whole concept of the “general
crisis of capitalism” in the imperialist stage and with
the advent of the first proletarian revolution in Russia. This
“general crisis” theory postulated a linear
straight-line down descent of capitalism in the imperialist
phase based on the somewhat mechanical notion that the ground
was being cut out and cut away from imperialism (even almost
literally in a geographic sense) in the world. So their
prediction divided very sharply into two. Perhaps, had they
been incorrect on an important question like that, it
would have been negated with a more correct methodology as to
how to approach the problem… but we’ll leave that
for further speculation another time.

In the Sixth Congress, while there is this revolutionary
thrust despite the errors and tendencies toward mechanical
materialism, economism and so on, there is a very clear line
that says that the interests of the building of socialism in
the Soviet Union and of the world revolution are one and the
same, identical. At that time, leaving aside certain agreements
still being maintained with Germany which were of a secondary
character, the Soviet Union was not in a position to and
therefore was not making a real attempt to develop a lot of
relations and agreements with a number of the different major
imperialist states. They had agreements of a minor sort but
that was exactly of a very minor and secondary character in
what was going on in the Soviet Union. For a number of reasons
including, principally, an overall correct revolutionary
orientation, they were putting their emphasis on making
revolution and supporting revolution in the
imperialist-controlled world and not on making use of
contradictions among the imperialists and reaching agreements
with certain imperialists as against others.

So therefore the fact that there was indeed a contradiction,
as I said, at times a very acute and potentially antagonistic
contradiction between the maintaining of power in one socialist
state and the advance of the world revolution overall, could in
a certain sense be mitigated and buried under the fact that the
Soviet national interests, or the national interests, if you
will, of the proletariat in power in the Soviet Union went
parallel with world revolution at that time and the policies
that were being adopted by the Soviet state did not come
sharply into conflict with the overall revolutionary struggle
in other parts of the world. Yes, it came into conflict here
and there but as a secondary matter. Nevertheless, even though
the world revolution was promoted overall and the attempt was
made to support and advance it, things were presented in terms
of an absolute identity of interests and at the same time it
was already beginning to be said—and this became much
more fully the line later and has been maintained and deepened
as the line down to today—that the leading edge, or the
cutting edge, of the world revolution was first the building
and then the defense of socialism (real or alleged) in the
Soviet Union (that is, the socialist road really being embarked
on and advanced on for a certain period and then only being
alleged and “socialism” being used as a cover for
capitalist restoration and imperialism later on).

Now all this, in turn, was linked with the way Stalin saw
and went about leading the transformation, especially the
economic transformation toward socialist ownership, in the
Soviet Union. Again, in a heightened way even beyond
the tendencies for this in Lenin, socialism was identified
overwhelmingly with industrialization. And industrialization,
so long as it was under state ownership, was seen as the key to
socialism and the identity between the two (that is industry
under state ownership and socialism) was made very
close—a very close and nearly one-to-one connection. And
at the same time the approach to agriculture and the
collectivization policy involved a number of serious errors.
This is not merely, unfortunately, a slander by Trotskyites and
even more openly reactionary enemies of socialism and of the
Soviet Union when it was socialist. The policy carried out
toward agriculture and the Soviet Union’s experience,
even under Stalin, was something Mao increasingly and ever more
deeply criticized. Agriculture was carried out in a way to
establish the basis for accumulation for industry in large part
by soaking the peasantry.

As Mao put it, you want the hen to lay eggs but you
don’t feed it; you want the horse to gallop but you
don’t give it fodder and so on. Basically they took a
tremendous amount from the peasantry as the basis for a
breakneck industrialization program at the same time as they
were carrying out rapid and wide-scale collectivization of
agriculture; this was all a package program for the socialist
transformation. And again the point here is not to go into and
thoroughly analyze this, but more to point here to the
need to go into and much more thoroughly analyze all
this. In the comments and criticisms made by Mao in places like
the Ten Major Relationships and consistently
throughout official (for now) Volume 5 of Mao’s works and
also in the CIA-collected Miscellany of Mao Tsetung
Thought and in the Chairman Mao Talks to the
People collection17 there is a consistent
thread of criticism of the Soviet policy toward the peasantry.
If you want to put it in a rather stark form, to a significant
degree, they carried out industrialization on the backs of the
peasantry while at the same time carrying out collectivization.
And all this in turn was linked to how Stalin saw socialism,
and here I’m not talking about the point stressed earlier
of seeing socialism as the elimination of antagonistic classes,
not just that, but the whole ensemble of envisioned
features of how he saw socialism, including the necessity for
the predominance of industry in a very short time.

Stalin did—it’s important to point this
out—struggle against a lot of the leftist deviations; he
wrote articles like “Dizzy With
Success”18 and other things against these
deviations when they represented a tendency within what was a
genuine revolutionary upsurge at that time of the late
’20s and early ’30s, going along with the whole
tenor and orientation of the Sixth Congress. You can see
reflected in the economic policies, in the superstructure, the
novels that were written and in other things, that this was a
genuine revolutionary upsurge that had an internationalist
character of a general kind to it. The thrust that came through
was, “We are transforming the world in order to build a
new world.” There was a lot of heroic, self-sacrificing
and largely class-conscious struggle on the part of a number of
advanced workers and elements among the peasantry,
intellectuals and so on. And, as far as investigation reveals
up to this point, this was linked with and largely under the
leadership of Stalin. It was not opposed to Stalin; it was not
a case of Stalin fighting to beat it down; it was more linked
with Stalin. And again, Stalin fought very hard at the same
time against the rather obvious and sharp expressions of
“left” deviations, that is, a tendency to
collectivize everything, as he put it, down to the church bell
in the village, and to collectivize everybody’s hens and
everything else. This was a natural deviation, somewhat similar
to those that arose in the course of the Great Leap Forward in
China. Stalin attempted to correct these “left”
excesses at the same time the general upsurge then of socialist
transformation with the general characteristics I’ve
mentioned was largely identified with and led by Stalin.

At the same time, having said all that, one gets the
impression that the breakneck industrialization and
collectivization and even a certain extracting of the surplus
for industrialization from the peasantry to a degree that Mao
correctly criticized was justified to a large degree in
Stalin’s thinking because he envisioned, with the
carrying through of these policies, the elimination of private
ownership in the old form and thereby really the end of
capitalism, or any real basis for capitalism within the Soviet
Union itself, except ideological survivals. So it’s like
the old saying (I think it was even used to justify some of
this): “When you cut down a forest a lot of splinters
fly.” In other words, yes, unfortunately, there’ll
be a lot of side effects to this that may cause problems but if
they’re correctly handled it will be worth it because
once we’ve uprooted private ownership then really
we’ve advanced to a whole new stage where the question of
restoration from within, any material basis for that, has been
all but uprooted. So, if you’re looking at it that way,
which is how Stalin was looking at it, then these kind of
breakneck policies and measures which perhaps strained in
particular the peasantry beyond a certain limit can still be
felt to be justified.

Now, again, to bring in another aspect of this and to look
at it from another dimension, in terms of the philosophical
outlook and methodology: I was reading the Textbook of
Marxist Philosophy which was produced by the Leningrad
Institute of Philosophy in 1937. It is an attempt to give a
fairly major and thorough summary of the development of Marxist
philosophy. Some parts of it are very good and it does again
reflect a real revolutionary kind of orientation when it was
written, but at the same time some of the mechanical
materialist tendencies in it—especially now in light of
all the contributions of Mao and the struggle around
that—are rather striking. In particular the way in which
the contradiction between quantity and quality is handled and
how that is linked up with a mechanical approach to the
economic transformation of ownership as being the alpha and
omega of socialist transformation. All that is rather striking,
and it’s sort of like we’re proceeding from this
quantity to that quantity and at a certain point we’ll
achieve the qualitative transformation of socialist ownership
and of the material base of society overall.

But in a certain sense an even more crucial political angle
on this is given concentrated expression in Stalin’s
statement in 1931 that the imperialist countries are decades
ahead of us, and we have to make good this difference within
one decade or else we’ll perish.19 This was
not simply a general, abstract statement about the need to
surpass the technology of capitalist countries but an already
beginning recognition that the question of war was coming on
the agenda and a view that in such a war production and weapons
would be decisive. And the policy got more and more crude as
time went on, at least the expression of it, and it became more
and more crude where at one point Stalin did literally say (and
unfortunately I don’t think I’m mistaken) that
whichever side produces more motors in World War 2 would win
the war. That’s just a crude expression of an underlying
general view that we’ve got to make good this difference
and surpass the countries in technology in ten years or else
we’re done for anyway.20 And you can see how
that dovetails with and sort of interpenetrates with these
other views that have been touched on and criticized in terms
of the overemphasis on industrialization, the policy of taking
too much from the peasantry, and so on and so forth.

What has to be brought out in addition is the political
dimension of this inside the Soviet Union itself. In delving
into and attempting to sum up this crucial experience of the
transformation of ownership the clear impression emerges that
particularly in the countryside there was a lot of resistance
especially from the Kulaks, of course, but I also get the
impression that while large sections of the peasantry were
mobilized there was also resistance and passivity among large
sections even of the middle-peasants and others who should have
been allies and should have been motive forces in this. And
while it is not entirely wrong in and of itself, it became
necessary to send wave after wave of advanced workers in
particular into the countryside to lead the battle in a
political and sometimes literally physical sense against the
Kulaks and even, unfortunately, broader strata, at times at
least, who were putting up resistance to the
collectivization.

And you get the impression that through this whole
industrialization policy, the way in which collectivization was
carried out, through the battles of this kind that had to be
waged to do it, that by the time it’s completed, by 1934,
more or less, there is a sense of a political exhaustion,
perhaps even in certain ways a physical exhaustion, but to a
large degree a political exhaustion, on the part of
the advanced elements inside the Soviet Union. That’s not
to deny the fact, and it would be idealist and metaphysical to
not recognize—that everything develops in a wave-like
fashion—or even better said in a spiral-type
motion—and things are not always at a high peak and
can’t always be at a high peak. It’s not
particularly surprising on the one hand that there would be
this kind of political exhaustion, but on the other hand,
rather than there being a period like Mao called for of upsurge
and then consolidation and the preparation for another upsurge,
it seems like this increasingly merged with erroneous
tendencies asserting themselves more sharply in the leadership
of Stalin and others through a complicated series of struggles
which I, at least, don’t by any means completely
understand.

But what emerges from studying the Soviet Union in this
period is the impression that by the middle ’30s and from
the middle ’30s on, already large sections even among the
advanced in the Soviet Union were confused,
demoralized and somewhat passive politically. Somebody who
became a renegade but had been a supporter of the Soviet Union
at one point reported on the very sharp contrast between the
earlier period of the ’20s and ’30s and the
situation in around 1936. (Renegades’ observations are
not always, and certainly not automatically, without any
merit.) He called attention to the fact that earlier he had met
people from different levels of leadership cadre as well as
masses who had a lot of enthusiasm, fighting for the future,
but after the mid-30s, especially among the cadre, all that he
met were sycophants and cynics and most people were both.
Unfortunately, regardless of the character of this particular
person, I think there was a great deal of truth to this; this
in fact was becoming a more and more predominant pattern
particularly among the cadre. And this links up with
developments in leadership and leading lines.

To step back for a second, you’ll recall Lenin had not
been completely free of some of these same tendencies, that is,
the notion that the viability of the proletarian
dictatorship—the socialist state—depended on higher
technique, a higher productive base than capitalism in general
and the imperialist stage in particular. Even though, as noted,
Lenin did say “in the final analysis” and so on he
nevertheless did have this tendency to make that identification
too direct and immediate. Lenin obviously did not live to
grapple with the fuller development and implications of this
contradiction. And as I mentioned before even in Lenin’s
famous response to the Mensheviks, Kautskyites, et
al.—why can’t we first seize power
and then create the kind of civilization that you say is
necessary, though you can’t say exactly what level it
is—even this can be seen to have a rather sharp
contradiction in it, refuting them on the one hand but
accepting certain bases of their orientation on the other. But
this became much more pronounced both as the contradiction
developed more fully and frankly also under the leadership of
people, including Stalin, who were not as thoroughly
dialectical nor as thoroughly materialist in their approach to
problems and their attempts to resolve problems as Lenin had
been. And increasingly from the mid-30s on (again this is noted
in the outline presented at the last Central Committee meeting
of our Party) wrong lines and policies were increasingly in
command in the Soviet Union and in the international communist
movement.

This was exemplified by the international policy adopted
increasingly by the Soviet Union and given concentrated
expression in the line adopted by the Seventh Congress of the
Comintern, the line of the united front against fascism as
represented in the Dimitroff report and so on. This took some
rather grotesque forms. Some of them have been sharply
criticized and dissected for example in the article in
Revolution magazine on the Spanish Civil War. The
examples can be multiplied on and on but even a beginning study
of this period with open eyes and an open mind reveals very
quickly the depth of the deviations from internationalism and
from Marxism-Leninism generally that was already taking hold.
Litvinov was a Soviet leader closely associated with a lot of
these open rightist policies in the international sphere in
terms of bourgeois diplomacy in dealing with the Western
states. In 1936, for example, Litvinov was dealing with the
French government at a time when there was a tremendous upsurge
of the French proletariat—not a revolutionary upsurge but
the very pronounced upsurge that perhaps(it needs to
be examined more closely) had revolutionary potential or
certainly represented a very radical uprising by significant
sections of the French proletariat which threw the bourgeoisie
into panic; they were on the verge of a great deal of chaos and
crisis. This was successfully cooled out by the CP and others.
Litvinov in the midst of this comes out with a statement saying
that the Soviet government certainly hopes that France can
resolve its problems and maintain security and stability and so
on.21 (Some of this needs to be checked more deeply,
but unfortunately I don’t think the essence is
distortion.) Now this is where the earlier error of covering
over or at least not recognizing the contradiction between the
need to maintain power in one state and the overall advance of
the world revolution has gone over to the point that this
contradiction has begun to assume antagonistic form because
it’s not recognized and/or not correctly dealt with.

In a certain sense you could say about the Soviet Union and
the international communist movement, and particularly looking
at the Soviet Union after the mid-’30s, that it was in
some important ways comparable to China after its Eighth
Congress in 1956. The Eighth Congress was where the revisionist
line was dominant throughout and overall, and where the
formulation was officially enshrined that the principal
contradiction was between the advanced socialist system and the
backward productive forces, where the dying out of classes and
class struggle was proclaimed in the reports by Liu Shaoqi and
by Deng Xiaoping and was generally the tenor and tone and
orientation of that Congress. Despite such similarities, there
are important differences: in China the Great Leap Forward
occurred after the Eighth Congress and there was struggle,
partial reversal and then the much higher upsurges of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution; in the Soviet Union after the
mid-’30s there was not that kind of development.

The outline (“For Decades to Come on a World
Scale”) analyzes the content of these wrong lines,
policies and overall orientation: bourgeois democracy,
economism, national chauvinism, national defensism in
imperialist countries, etc. These erroneous lines were
continued and deepened and carried to a much more profound
level during World War 2. That outline also mentions
Stalin’s speeches on the Great Patriotic War (and just
reading the description of them in that outline doesn’t
give you a sense as to what depths they sunk—and
that’s the only way it can be described from a
Marxist-Leninist standpoint). This is a correct and a necessary
characterization of the policy during World War 2 despite a
more “Leninist” interval in the first phase of the
war, that is, the phase before the Soviet Union was directly
involved in any significant way (leaving aside a brief war with
Finland). Then the war was characterized as inter-imperialist
and basically portrayed in the same light as World War 1.
Although there was superficially a “Leninist”
orientation and correct stand taken on the war, even then it
was marked by a certain amount of pacifism. But more than that,
as that outline pointed out, it was overall and fundamentally a
superficially “correct” policy taken for the same
wrong reasons as the earlier and later policies during
the attempt to carry out the “Collective Security”
with Western imperialism and the whole united front against
fascism line of the Comintern. All these policies were frankly
a rationalization for and an attempt to make the communist
movement’s policy an extension of the international
policy and line of the Soviet Union. The line in the
“Leninist” interval in the first phase of the war,
while it had some superficial aspects that seemed more correct,
was not fundamentally better than that policy before the war
broke out and the policy as it further degenerated after the
Soviet Union entered the war.

To put it in a nutshell, World War 2 on the part of the
Soviet Union, was fought on a patriotic—that is
bourgeois-democratic—basis. It has to be said here that
Red Papers 7 is wrong in the way that it upholds
the necessity for conducting the war on this basis; in fact it
was not necessary nor correct to conduct the war on a patriotic
and a bourgeois-democratic basis. But this was the logical
extension of wrong views, lines and policies and the generally
wrong orientation that had been adopted and which led overall
to the growing strength of the bourgeois—largely new
bourgeois—forces within the Party and the state at the
same time that concessions were made to the old bourgeois
forces within the Soviet Union, including among the
peasantry—and especially in Russia, because the
Russian nationality was singled out as “first among
all” Soviet peoples by the end of the war.

There was all that stuff about Ivan the Terrible coming on
top of Alexander Nevsky and on and on which were such grotesque
expressions of this in the cultural sphere. And all of a sudden
all these old priests are lumbering out again; after being
correctly put to slumber, they were allowed to come out with
their medals and icons and robes and obscurantism; these and
all sorts of things represented, reflected and were part of the
attempt to mobilize the nation on a bourgeois-democratic basis,
on the basis of Russian patriotism, overwhelmingly. And
internationalism was flushed down the drain on a pragmatic and
nationalist basis in order to defend the nation and beat back
the attacks on it at all costs.

This has to be said because some of the more acute (or maybe
we should say less obtuse) opportunists have made their
own summations of the experience of the Soviet Union
and the international communist movement during the period of
Stalin’s leadership in particular, and have seized on the
irony that at the very time when the Soviet Union’s
prestige in the world and among a lot of progressive mankind
was at the highest, its internationalism was at the lowest and
its tendency toward revolution was the most degenerated. And
you frequently run into this strange sort of circular and
self-contained logic that is employed in defending the Soviet
Union’s policies. Basically the argument is that whatever
the Soviet Union did was good and you start from there and get
back to there.

For example, whatever the Soviet Union did that turned more
revolutionary elements away from it when it was carrying out
the collective security in the late ’30s (or, for that
matter, turned more bourgeois-democratic elements away from it
when it made the pact with Germany)—all of it is
justified on the most contradictory bases which can only be
reduced to “it was good for the Soviet Union.”
Actually, perhaps it’s possible to see more justification
for the pact with Germany than the earlier attempt to carry out
collective security. But, you see, the whole movement is so
steeped in this Nazi preoccupation that when one gets
to that phase of history with lots of people, science goes out
the window and all of a sudden it’s “Nazis”
and “ruling the world” and “democratic
liberties down the drain” and all sorts of horrors that,
on the one hand, were real enough but are characteristic of
imperialism and not something with a German
accent.

This really has to be gone into because confronting
scientifically what the Soviet Union’s lines and policies
were, confronting the fact that the reputation of the Soviet
Union was revived and built to its highest point precisely at a
time when it was going furthest away from internationalism has
been gotten around by many old arguments. Any of us who have
been around very long have all argued at one time or another
that the proof of the fact that the people in the Soviet Union
all supported socialism was: look how heroically they
fought, even behind the lines, against Germany. But
unfortunately it is a fact that people can be mobilized to do
that on a basis of nationalism and patriotism, and there are
plenty of examples of this in history, even modern history.
Maybe in some ways they can be mobilized this way more easily
in the short run than they can on the basis of socialism and
internationalism. But that does not at all prove—it begs,
or avoids anyway—the question of what the people
were fighting for. The Yugoslavian masses, for example,
supported Tito against Stalin on a nationalist basis. Well,
that doesn’t prove that there was socialism in Yugoslavia
or that the people there were heroically fighting for
socialism; they were “heroically” fighting, but
they were not fighting for socialism. And to a large degree
that was also the case in the Soviet Union during the course of
the war.

I remember one time I had an argument with a member of the
Black Panther Party when Huey Newton had come up with the idea
that they were going to satisfy the needs of the masses by
running little factories—sweatshops to make
clothes—and give them to the people. And so I brought up
the almost facile, but true, objection, “Hey, that sort
of smacks of capitalism.” And the response was,
“Well, it would be capitalism and it
wouldn’t be revolutionary except that
we’re doing it and we’re
revolutionaries.” While I found that logic not very
convincing in the case of the Panthers, nevertheless, for a lot
of emotional reasons and because of the fact that the Soviet
Union was the first socialist state and it
was under attack by imperialism and it was
fighting for its life and so on, that same sort of logic has
deeply embedded itself in and become a part, even almost
unconsciously, in the thinking of some people who went through
that period. It was the case to a large degree that whatever
the Soviet Union did, if somebody else did it you would
denounce it but because the Soviet Union did it and the Soviet
Union was socialist, it took on a different character ipso
facto, by mere virtue of the fact that the Soviet Union
was doing it. And the question was again begged as to who was
doing what and what did it prove.

If you want to see what it’s like, you can see the
inverse of it with all the Albania-philes now. When they attack
the “three worlds” theory, then the defenders and
apologists of the Chinese revisionist line, who are
the opposite pole of the same stupidity (and who are not
without a brain) come forward and say, “But what about
World War 2 and the anti-fascist war of the Soviet
Union—didn’t they do that?” And then
the Albania-philes come back and say, “Ho! this is
ridiculous. Everybody knows World War 2 was completely
different because…because…because that was the
Soviet Union and those were Nazis.” If
you want to know what it was like, that’s what it was
like. And you still can see it.

Sometimes the argument is made: “Yes, but look, you
can say what you want about what the Soviet Union did in World
War 2, but look at the prestige that the communists got all
over the world as a result of what the Soviet Union did, how it
led the fight against the Nazis, look at the public opinion
that was created for what the Soviet Union stood for.”
But that, too, begs the question: the prestige of the
communists for what? Representing what? Was it really
communism that was gaining in support and prestige,
and what was it that the Soviet Union stood for that the public
opinion was being built up around? This is a problem.

I once said in an argument of this kind that often times,
and particularly with some of the ideological crippling that
went on during this period in particular (and its legacy has
continued, unfortunately) it’s the case that everybody in
the street, advanced and backward, progressive and reactionary,
and so on knows a lot of basic truths about what the
proletariat in power has done and what its experience has been
before the communists know it. For example, to move that from
the abstract realm and make it very concrete, almost everybody
who was around at the time knows the Soviet Union carried out a
policy putting its national interests above everything else in
and around World War 2, and only some communists are the ones
who won’t accept it, can’t face up to it and will
go for any sort of rationalization to try to justify
not having to come to terms with a basic simple fact. Yes,
there’s a limitation to common sense, but every common
man and woman in the street who even read the newspaper and
could follow world events to a minimal degree knows this truth.
And yet it’s embarrassingly true that a lot of the
communists steeped in that tradition and that methodology are
the last ones to come around beginning to accept that fact.

Well, that’s a little aside, but there is a lesson
there that we should grasp more deeply. Particularly in light
of the present developing situation it is fundamental to see
that all this that we’ve been talking about was strongly
linked to the wrong view of the development of things
internationally through spirals to the sharpening up of
conjunctures, it was linked to the erroneous views of
“general crisis.” Here it’s interesting to
note that if you look at the book by R. Palme Dutt,
Fascism and Social Revolution,22 you
can see how that quickly gave way to the united front against
fascism—the Dimitroff line—and to the terrible
errors that were made and deviations that were fallen into
(around Spain to take one key example). And you can see the
tendencies to mechanical materialism, bourgeois democracy,
economism and so on. I was struck re-reading Dutt’s book
recently—not having read it for maybe a decade—that
it really, literally says that capitalism can no longer develop
the productive forces—period, end of point—and if
capitalism continues with its inexorable logic, mankind will be
dragged back to primitive village life with labor-intensive,
scattered production. But before that’ll happen, Dutt
says, they’ll destroy the whole world with war because,
after all, capitalism tends to destroy the productive forces
and war is just the most extreme expression of that. It’s
just extremely crude mechanical materialism; now that’s
not so surprising, there’s lots of that, but that this
book got such currency in the international movement—even
though it was criticized, still it wasn’t just regarded
as the work of a quack—reflects something
significant.

In Dutt’s book the line is not that there are some
states that are fascist and bad and others that are democratic
and good, but that every capitalist society is inevitably
heading towards fascism, it’s only a question of degree
and quantity, how far along they are towards that; all of them
are equally bad, equally responsible for the war that can be
seen to be shaping up. It says that the bourgeoisie in this
period is totally incapable of holding up even its own historic
contributions, economically in terms of developing the
productive forces, or politically in terms of bourgeois
democracy and upholding the interests of the nation, and that
it falls on the proletariat to uphold and carry forward these
things; and socialism is sort of made a two-into-one with that,
even though this line overall has a “left”
opportunist character to it. You can see that once you’ve
made upholding bourgeois democracy and the interests of the
nation the centerpiece of everything then, if after all there
is among the bourgeoisie the tendency to defend the nation and
to uphold bourgeois democracy, at least in certain conditions,
it’s not a big leap, it’s just the opposite pole of
the same stupidity, to say that we should ally with the
bourgeoisie or those bourgeois forces who will in fact uphold
the interests of the nation and who will in fact uphold
bourgeois democracy—in other words, the united front
against fascism line.

Now it’s true and it should be said again that a lot
of this was rationalization for and an extension of Soviet
foreign policy and an attempt to mobilize the working class in
various countries as a pressure group on the bourgeoisie in
support of Soviet diplomacy and Soviet international dealings.
But insofar as Dutt’s line should be taken seriously in
its own right, there is an easy flip from the Dutt line where
the whole bourgeoisie is condemned for abandoning its own
historical role in terms of the nation, developing the
productive forces, and democracy and therefore all should be
overthrown; from this mechanical materialist, really
unbelievably crude, almost silly point of view,
it’s an easy flip over to where certain sections of the
bourgeoisie or the bourgeoisie in certain countries should be
aligned with because they at least have a tendency to uphold
the nation, bourgeois democracy and perhaps the productive
forces.

Here: an interesting question that struck me in going back
and reading over the “National Nihilism”
article.23 In that article there are all sorts of
horrendous quotes from the Comintern in the late ’30s
where they’re trying to wiggle out of the Leninist policy
against defense of the fatherland in imperialist countries in
imperialist wars. And at one point they come right out and say,
look, back in earlier times the working class had a lot of
bitter feelings about the nation because they were basically on
the outside looking in but now they’ve made it to where
they’ve got trade unions and a role in parliament and so
on, and now they have a real stake in the nation, so therefore
it’s different. At first when you look at all these
statements by the Comintern referred to above about how the
workers now have a stake in the nation and so on, you say,
“What an outrage and what a distortion;” but
what’s even more provocative is to ask the question: was
this in fact a reflection of an attempt by the Comintern to
make itself the spokesman for and to rally as its social base
that section of the workers—the more bourgeoisified and
aristocratic section even in the midst of this
depression—who did in fact fit this description
and did have the very sentiments that the Comintern was talking
about? That’s a question that needs more exploring but it
is, in fact, among such workers that you would find more
receptivity for the line of promoting bourgeois democracy,
economism, national chauvinism, defense of the fatherland, and
so on. Maybe it’s not simply a distortion but a more
conscious intent on the part of the Soviet leadership and the
Comintern to mobilize that section of the working class or to
appeal to that section of the working class as
pressure on the bourgeoisie in those countries to come to terms
with the Soviet Union on the basis the Soviet Union was
seeking.

There is another important point in connection with
Dutt’s book and the line of the Comintern. In talking
about the German workers and the respective social bases of the
Communist Party and the Social Democrats during the ’20s
and ’30s, basically he says that the reason that we
didn’t succeed here, the reason we didn’t make
revolution here is because, “the goddam social democrats,
they fucked it up. And you know how they fucked up? You know
what they did? They acted like social democrats.” That
sort of argument was often characteristic of the Comintern.
It’s very frustrating to read that kind of summation as a
supposedly materialist and dialectical analysis of why you
didn’t have revolution in Germany—that the Social
Democrats didn’t act like communists. Well, okay,
that’s the way it is, and you learn to use Marxism like a
scythe to cut through it. But what strikes you at a certain
point reading this is that in fact the CP had a lot of its base
not among the more unionized workers who were in this
position the Comintern was talking about in the quotes above,
but in fact among workers who perhaps more tended to be
unemployed, were less stable, at least in the bourgeois sense
of what that means. A lot of the CP’s base was the kind
of people you see come alive in the novel Barricades in
Berlin; they were not necessarily your skilled craftsmen
or members of the social-democratic union and the church and so
on and so forth.

The international movement was paralyzed by its own wrong,
mechanical materialist, metaphysical and trade unionist,
economist tendencies to where it thought that it couldn’t
do anything basically until it won over the social
base of the social democrats. This is not the same thing as the
correct understanding that it is necessary to win over at least
a good part of that social base in the course of building a
revolutionary movement, but was rather presented
metaphysically, statically and as a question of winning them
all at one time. It was supposedly necessary first to
win over that base before you could do anything rather than
mobilizing the communists’ own base, rallying around it
the forces that could be drawn to it and on that basis building
a revolutionary movement and seeking the ways to win over at
least a large part of the social democrats’ base. The CP
was paralyzed by it and that’s something that needs to be
summed up a lot more deeply.

But to return to the policy of the Soviet Union in relation
to World War 2: the victory of the Soviet Union, on a patriotic
basis, doesn’t justify the old “proof” that
the masses there supported socialism. And as I said, we can
point to the example of Yugoslavia where the masses supported
Tito against Stalin on a nationalist basis, and to those who
have a one-sided view of the question of democracy, democracy
among the masses, relying on the masses, and so on and so
forth, it can be pointed out that when the open break came
between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union after the war, the
Tito-ites openly carried out their polemics with the Soviet
Union in front of the Yugoslav masses. They took all of
Stalin’s attacks on Yugoslavia, printed them up in
hundreds of thousands of copies along with their response, and
distributed them broadly for the Yugoslav masses. And
overwhelmingly the Yugoslav masses supported Tito and not
Stalin, which proves not very much of anything; because the
problem is that that doesn’t tell you what kind of line
people were being mobilized behind. It does tell you one thing:
tailing behind the masses, the idea that, in a mechanical
sense, just letting everybody know what’s going on and
having their say, does not guarantee that the truth and the
interests of the proletariat, which are the same in a
fundamental sense, are going to win out in the short run.
Because whatever Stalin’s errors, Tito was in fact
qualitatively worse and was a revisionist and indeed a lackey
of imperialism and was not in any sense opposing Stalin from a
more revolutionary standpoint or fighting for a more
revolutionary direction within the international communist
movement.

This I think gives more insight also into the question of
China. Albania and Enver Hoxha notwithstanding, Mao was most
certainly not Tito. But the Chinese Party, I think we
can see in retrospect, was full of Tito types. And one thing
that struck me in reading their latest resolution summing up
some important questions on the Chinese party history and on
Mao in particular is that these revisionists in power there are
not without any basis when they accuse Mao of departing from
the common course that they were all on—in other words,
actually going beyond the framework of the new-democratic
revolution onto the socialist road and continuing the
revolution towards communism. By the end Mao certainly did
stand out as one of the few—and of course the
leader—of the veterans who really were striving for a
communist world, surrounded by a bunch of people who never went
beyond wanting to have the chance to rule over a powerful,
modern China assuming its “rightful place among
nations.” It was Mao who “departed” from
this. So this is something like another side, in a provocative
way, of the question of bourgeois democrats turning into
capitalist roaders as the revolution enters and deepens in the
socialist period.

The Chinese revolution, in particular in its first stage,
did not require in some important ways a radical or thorough
rupture with much that was wrong or had become wrong in the
international communist movement—in particular the
international communist movement’s departure in
significant aspects from Leninism, as for example concentrated
in the united front against fascism. Because to take the united
front against fascism—and I think it’s interesting
and it could be well explored more deeply—the focus was
overwhelmingly on Europe. And I think that that’s not
entirely accidental, for two reasons. One, because it reflects
the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy at the time and their
attempts to deal with the Western imperialist democracies; and
on the other hand, if you were going to make a case about how
much more terrible the fascist states were than the
democracies, you’d make it better in Europe where there
was more democracy than you would if you went in some of the
colonial countries and started arguing about how great British
imperialism was for India, for example, as compared with
Japanese imperialism and its colonies.

So in the colonies, while it wasn’t fully developed,
the general line was the united front against imperialism and
it was correct in China as the conditions developed there to
develop a united front against Japanese imperialism as the main
enemy, which meant in fact, through the medium of Chiang
Kai-shek, a united front of sorts with British and U.S.
imperialism, or at least a neutralizaton of them, in the sense
of putting them aside and not making them an immediate target
or enemy in that stage of the struggle. In these circumstances
that was correct and did not prevent the Chinese revolution
from going forward.

Now a lot of the policies that became increasingly
associated with this, of subordinating yourself—not just
allying on one level or another but actually
subordinating yourself—to the bourgeois forces,
to even the comprador elements and their imperialist masters,
those kinds of policies would have killed revolution in China.
And it’s over those kinds of questions that Mao came into
sharp conflict with the Comintern and Stalin in the form of
Wang Ming inside China itself, who as everybody knows who cares
to know, was pushing Stalin’s and the Comintern’s
line inside China, was pushing capitulation to and
subordination to the Kuomintang and ultimately U.S. and British
imperialism. Over those questions Mao waged very sharp
struggle.

I’m certainly not saying Mao was an opportunist, or a
narrow pragmatist or nationalist, but there is something to
materialism and there is something to the fact that the
questions that most sharply pose themselves to you, especially
in the crush and press of revolutionary struggle, are the ones
that you’re going to go into more deeply, to begin with
at least. I think that’s reflected in the fact that over
those points of subordination and capitulation to bourgeois
allies there was a lot of rupturing but not over the basic
orientation of taking up the defense of the nation and a lot of
other things which weren’t wrong—at least they
weren’t wrong in principle—when applied in the
colonies, but were wrong in principle as they were applied
where, in fact, their main emphasis was given, in the
imperialist countries, especially the ones that the Soviet
Union was seeking to ally with.

At the end of all this, coming out of World War 2, the
future road of the Soviet Union was very acutely posed, that
is, the question of the capitalist road versus the socialist
road. In a certain sense we could say that it was a question of
retaking the socialist road and that to do this would
have required something on the order of or like the Cultural
Revolution in China, but as we know this did not happen.
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe we can refer first of all to
Stalin’s statement (which apparently he made to Djilas,
who was a renegade, but I think it’s correct to assume
the statement was made) where Stalin, commenting on World War
2, said that this war is different than others in the past
because wherever anyone’s army reaches, he can impose his
social system there. Now we have to say that there is an aspect
of truth in what Stalin says but the question that immediately
poses itself is, what kind of system can be imposed with this
view? And, again, this is not to raise the objections that
revolution cannot be exported, socialism cannot possibly come
if it comes through the Red Army of Russia as the main armed
force in the particular circumstances rather than the people of
the nation concerned or something like that; but still, the
question is: with that view of imposing a social system by that
means, what kind of social system can be in fact imposed?

It’s not accidental that there never really was, as
Mao did point out, a real effort or any real progress in
mobilizing the masses themselves in revolutionary struggle and
to become masters of society, without which the dictatorship of
the proletariat and socialism (even in the relative sense in
which we have to understand that those exist and not as some
abstract absolute), nevertheless even in that sense, they are
not possible without that kind of line and without that kind of
mobilization of the masses and conscious struggle. So
it’s not surprising that this did not happen. In fact, it
has to be said bluntly that socialism never existed in
these Eastern European countries (Albania is a different case
whose history needs to be looked at separately) and it was
never created through class-conscious struggle of the masses
there with a proletarian vanguard, and that’s the only
way it’s possible—without that it obviously
couldn’t exist.

As mentioned, in the aftermath of World War 2 in the Soviet
Union, reviving socialism would have required nothing less than
something like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But
soon after that and in particular after Stalin’s death,
what was required was a whole overthrow of the entire social
system with the forging of a new vanguard—something
qualitatively different from the Cultural Revolution which was
a mass upheaval, but under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In fact, rule was seized by the bourgeoisie and consolidated
fully and restoration of capitalism undertaken with a
vengeance. And here a point should be briefly underlined that
attention was called to in that outline presented at the last
Central Committee: that the socialist camp was in fact riddled
with contradictions and more than that, the contradictions
within it were coming to a head at the very time when it was at
its height, that is, in the 1950s, more or less.

Now in our reply to Enver Hoxha, “Beat Back the
Dogmato-Revisionist Attack on Mao Tsetung
Thought,”24 we call attention to the question
of “state of the whole people” and “party of
the whole people.” And in the context of talking about
the fact that there is the continuation of classes and class
struggle under socialism, we point out that in a certain sense
Stalin’s policy or understanding on this represented a
muddle, in that he said, on the one hand, there were no
antagonistic classes and no one to suppress, other than foreign
agents in the Soviet Union itself, but that the state and the
dictatorship of the proletariat were still necessary because of
foreign imperialist encirclement and the infiltration of its
agents. We point out that really that’s an argument that
leads toward Khrushchev’s point, because Khrushchev never
said you don’t need a state, he just said that because
there are no longer antagonistic classes in the Soviet Union,
you don’t need a dictatorship of the proletariat; you
just need a state to deal with the foreign enemies. Stalin
didn’t go that far; Stalin said, well, we still need a
state to deal with foreign enemies so we still need the
dictatorship of the proletariat even though there are not
antagonistic classes within the Soviet Union. We summed it up
by saying that Stalin’s position is a muddle, whereas
Khrushchev resolved the muddle; and in that contradiction
Stalin’s muddle is infinitely preferable to
Khrushchev’s resolution, but it’s still a muddle
and not very good.

And I think that’s not only correct on the question of
the state, and therefore along with it the party, of the whole
people (Khrushchev’s famous “two wholes”). In
examining it more deeply, it is also largely the case that on
Khrushchev’s famous “three peacefuls,” that
is, peaceful competition, peaceful coexistence and peaceful
transition to socialism, this again can largely be described as
a case of Khrushchev’s resolving Stalin’s muddle.
Khrushchev’s resolution is infinitely and qualitatively
worse than Stalin’s muddle, but Stalin’s policies
were a muddle of the same sort; if you read Stalin’s
policy statements after World War 2, even allowing for a
certain amount of diplomatic doubletalk and so on (which may or
may not be necessary but can’t be ruled out in principle
in any case), it still becomes clear that he himself at times,
particularly after the War, is promoting these “three
peacefuls” in various forms, not only peaceful
competition and peaceful coexistence but peaceful
cooperation.

In fact, a question which I am grappling with and is worth
pondering is: if Stalin had succeeded, for example, in forcing
on Mao the policy that he attempted to enforce, that is, of
killing the Chinese revolution after World War 2 and getting
Mao to enter, in a subordinate position, into a coalition
government with Chiang Kai-shek, would the U.S. have then
turned on the Soviet Union to the same degree that it did?
Because in other places where he was able to, Stalin did what
he could do (and in some cases it wasn’t insignificant)
to kill the revolutionary struggle of the masses in order not
to bring down the wrath of U.S. imperialism. I think we have to
face up to this in the case of Greece and a number of other
places. I don’t claim at this point to have unraveled
this muddle, but it’s certainly not so clear-cut as
perhaps we have thought in the past and some still want to
cling to; and I think that at best it’s a question of
Stalin’s muddle and Khrushchev’s resolution.

The reason I say muddle, though, is that
particularly after the U.S. adopted a more hostile policy
toward the Soviet Union, more specifically in the Korean War
and so on, at the time of Stalin’s last major work,
Economic Problems of Socialism in the
USSR,25 he is again talking about the
inevitability of war among the imperialists and saying that
it’s necessary to eliminate imperialism before war can be
eliminated. But exactly what that’s all part of and how
it links up with his views on revolution is not at all clear,
because at the same time, that is at the 19th Congress of the
Soviet Party in 1952,26 he’s pushing the same
line about the working class in the capitalist countries
becoming the inheritors of the banner of democratic liberties
and the banner of the nation and a lot of the same stuff that
we’re familiar with and which was very clear in the U.S.
party. I was just reading William Z. Foster’s
History of the Three Internationals27
and the whole end of it is all the same peaceful transition,
two-stage (non-) revolution, democracy going over someday into
socialism and maybe we’ll have to curb the monopolies if
they get uppity after we’ve basically implemented
socialism and so on and so forth. All of that stuff’s in
there and he was not that distant from the line that was being
promoted by Stalin, even shortly before his death. So this
needs to be looked at; it’s pointed out in the outline
I’ve referred to a number of times. It’s said that
Stalin’s Economic Problems… needs to
be looked at again in this light and I think all this needs to
be much more critically and much more deeply summed up, not
just by ourselves but through struggle in the whole
international communist movement.

So if you say all that, everything that’s been said
here today, then why do you say that the Soviet Union was
socialist during this period? And I think, in what might seem
like an irony, it’s precisely because, in an overall
sense, line is decisive. Here we have to briefly raise
the question, what is capitalism and what is socialism, and
understand more deeply how line is key after all. A lot of
people talk about capitalism and socialism, capitalism restored
or not in the Soviet Union, socialism advancing or not in the
Soviet Union and so on, but one of the problems is that there
is often not a very clear understanding of what after all
capitalism and socialism are.

What is capitalism? What is capital? I want to read here
something I wrote in response to the idea that even under
socialism, capital is the dominant economic relationship. In
refuting that idea I wrote the following: “Capital is a
social relation and a process, whose essence is indeed the
domination by alien, antagonistic interests over labor power
and the continual (and extended) reproduction of that. But, to
get to the heart of the problem here, if ownership has been (in
the main) socialized, if a correct line is in command
(irrelevant for the calculations of the kind that say that
capital in any case is dominant under socialism but truly at
the heart of the matter)—which means that the division of
labor as well as differences in distribution are being
restricted to the greatest degree possible—then how is
the relationship and process capital? It is true that the
division of labor characteristic of capitalism (and previous
class society in general) has not been completely overcome,
that it may still have considerable influence and in any case
is only restricted to a certain degree, while bourgeois right
is dominant (or at least very influential) in distribution, but
if the motion is toward eliminating these things, then how can
it be said that a force opposed to the proletariat has
domination over its labor power or even a force alien to it, in
the fundamental sense?”

Now the point here is not that we should use
what’s said there, having drawn on the experience in
China, as a stiff yardstick to put down on the Soviet Union.
The point is not that, during the period of
Stalin’s leadership and in the 1930s in particular, there
was an attempt to restrict bourgeois right in a significant way
in distribution, nor that there was an attempt to make all
possible strides toward overcoming the division of labor. This
was not so, because the necessity for doing that and the way in
which that interpenetrates with the question of
ownership—not just the form, but the content—and
all these points that were focused on very sharply by Mao
especially in the last few years of his life, those questions
were in fact not well understood or grasped; and that’s
partly a question of the limitations of historical experience
and partly a question of the methodology of Stalin and the
Soviet leadership at that time. But nevertheless, the essential
question that should be focused on, the question I was driving
at in what I just read, is precisely what is capital?

There never will be a time, as far as I’m
concerned—and we pointed to this in the article
criticizing Bettelheim28—when in the most
literal and absolute sense there is appropriation by the direct
producers of the product of their labor. Even under communism
things will go to society as a whole; this is a point Marx made
in criticizing the Gotha Programme. Things will go to society
as a whole and there will always be some form of exchange
between a particular unit of production and the rest of
society, however that works out; it’s never going to be
that people simply appropriate in the most literal sense
directly what they produce. And there will always be in one
form or another political representatives; despite all the
science fiction and everything else, I do not believe that the
highest level that can be achieved is where everybody puts on
their TV, listens to a big debate and pushes a computer, yes or
no, up or down, kill ’em, throw ’em out, make
’em president or whatever; I don’t believe
that’s the way that decision-making is going to be done
under communism. There will be political representatives and
struggle among them, and the masses will be decisive, yes, but
not in the literal, direct, good old town meeting
tradition.

I think it was a correct thrust of the Four (following Mao)
in China that they raised the question of political leadership
and line being essential. And as to the question of socialism
in the Soviet Union, well, it’s ironic but in a certain
way intention does count for a lot. Because in the period, and
particularly up to the early ’30s, what was the
leadership in the Soviet Union trying to do? I’m sure the
Trotskyites would love to hear this because it sounds extremely
subjective, but what the leadership was trying to do and what
the masses were being mobilized to do is extremely important,
because what is capital? Is capital simply the fact that you
work in an office and have more influence than I who work in a
factory? That doesn’t make you capitalist, that’s
not capital.

The essence of capital is that the labor power of the
workers is controlled by a force alien to them and it’s
handed over to an alien force; and if it’s alien (and
even beyond that, antagonistic) it means that that labor power
is controlled and utilized on an expanded basis to reproduce
relationships which are alien to them and opposed to them;
otherwise capital has no meaning. And it is not identical with
a mere division of labor, though capitalism cannot be
completely overcome and the bourgeois epoch cannot be
completely transcended till that kind of oppressive division of
labor is transcended. Of course, I don’t believe there
will ever be a complete or absolute elimination of all division
of labor either, but the division of labor characteristic of
capitalism and class society will have to be transcended. But
even the mere existence of the division of labor characteristic
of class society, though it must be transformed throughout
socialism, is not identical with nor the same thing as
capitalism. And the question is, what were the Soviet masses
being mobilized to do at least up through the early ’30s?
They were being mobilized to transform society in the direction
of socialism, and for the purpose of contributing to the world
revolution; and for that reason I believe that that was not
capital, but socialism was in fact the dominant relation.

I think this helps us to understand why it is that Mao could
say that in China, the policies of the revisionists largely
dominated during a period before the Cultural Revolution, that
the majority of factories were following the revisionist line;
but still not say—and he never did say—that China
was not socialist in that period. Now how could that
be? Well, these people who are anarcho-syndicalists, which
Bettelheim tends toward (and others following him), think the
ultimate purpose of world revolution is to control your
factory. Mao was much more profoundly correct, and through
struggling through some of these questions my own understanding
has been deepened of the fact that line is decisive. It is
precisely a concentrated expression of economics because what
is the question—the question is what are you working for,
what is your labor power being applied to.

With all the mistakes and limitations, I think it’s
correct to say, from an historical standpoint, that the
proletariat’s labor power was not being controlled and
utilized by an alien force in this period in the USSR and was
not being utilized to reproduce relations where it was
controlled by an alien force. Increasingly from the
mid-’30s on, that question was thrown into serious doubt
and perhaps that was being reversed all along the line; but
again, as Mao said, the majority of the factories can be
following a revisionist line, but if overall there hasn’t
been a thorough change in the superstructure, then it’s
wrong to say that the bourgeoisie has control of society and
capitalism is already on the way to being restored if not
already restored by that time.

At this point in the Soviet Union, the war—fought on a
patriotic, basically bourgeois-democratic, basis—comes on
the agenda; and the question of the nature of that society, as
I said, is thrown up for grabs. After the war the monumental
effort that would have had to have been made to put it firmly
back (for the time being) onto the socialist road was not
undertaken, let alone successfully carried out. Therefore it
was, in a certain sense, ripe like a plum or ripe fruit to fall
into the hands of the revisionists; and in fact they did
resolve all the muddles and did thoroughly conclude the
process—concluded it with a qualitative leap,
however—of taking the Soviet Union onto the capitalist
road. And here once more the crucial lesson is that we have to
have both a sweeping historical view and at the same time
rigorously and critically dissect crucial historical experience
of the proletarian dictatorship and the journeys, the tortuous
advances and then setbacks on the socialist road so far.

Well, that’s some points on the Soviet Union. Now a
few more points on the question of Mao, again making a general
reference at the beginning to the summation and the outline of
the last Central Committee on this question. First of all,
it’s necessary to say that Mao’s contributions,
which we referred to as immortal contributions, are indeed
actually that, and this is a real and a true statement, not
just a routine statement; it’s not something we just have
to say because then we’re going to make criticism. Still
less is it sentimentality or some such thing; in fact,
it’s not only true in general but it is extremely
important to grasp and build on these contributions. But at the
same time, as that outline pointed out, it is not enough just
to stand with Mao; nor still less is it sufficient or correct
to retreat—and that’s what it would be in this
case—to Stalin.

Here we can look for a very brief second at Albania
today—not the magazine but the place, the
society—and we can say that to repeat, like Enver Hoxha,
the errors of Stalin and to retreat to Stalin in the face of
and against the advances that have been made is truly
“first time tragedy, second time farce.” Just as an
aside here it’s interesting to note how Lenin during
World War 1, in commenting on the so-called socialists, in
places like Switzerland and some of the smaller countries in
Scandinavia and so on, pointed out an unmistakable tendency
which he characterized as the petty-bourgeois nationalism of
petty states, the longing to stay aside from the great
tumultuous events of the world and of world history and,
interestingly enough, he called this the desire to exploit
their privileged position. Now you might think that’s
kind of funny because you don’t think of small states
generally as having privileged positions in the world: they
don’t generally dominate large parts of the world;
Belgium has had colonies and so has the Netherlands, but you
don’t generally think of them as being great world powers
with a great deal of privilege. But what he’s talking
about, precisely in the case of Switzerland and some of these
other countries, is their ability, for various reasons, to stay
out of these world conflagrations like World War 1 and the
socialists’ desiring to preserve at all costs and take
advantage of that privileged position. And in a certain sense I
think there is an analogy there with Albania—whose
objections to the “three worlds” theory are
nationalist, fundamentally, and come down to the fact that
Albania’s own national interests are not served (at this
point in any case) by the latest turns of the Chinese foreign
policy, in particular as it has been implemented as a
counter-revolutionary policy under the revisionists; and
it’s truly an example of the petty-bourgeois nationalism
which has a strong material base in a state like Albania and
which now dominates there.

But returning to Mao, it’s important to apply again
the same approach as was just stressed—that is,
historical sweep combined with rigorous and critical dissecting
of crucial historical experience—and by doing that we can
see that, on the one hand, if we can say that the Commune,
despite its weaknesses and even its lack of Marxist leadership,
was after all the dictatorship of the proletariat; and if the
Soviet Union, despite all of its weaknesses and the errors made
under Stalin’s leadership, was genuinely socialism
looking at it overall; then certainly and in an even greater
way the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in particular in
the Chinese revolution was indeed the highest pinnacle yet
reached by the international proletariat and the line of
continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the
proletariat as forged by Mao and applied in the Cultural
Revolution was a great and truly historic advance. On the other
hand, there is a need even here for further destruction and
radical rupture, and this has been touched on before.

Just to review it a bit and try to deepen some particular
points, there was in Mao a tendency, which stands out sharply
in opposition to his overall dialectical approach and his
contributions in that area, toward a somewhat linear approach
to revolution, that is, a somewhat country-by-country advance,
first to socialism and then to communism. And there was a view
of revolution which was not the crudest expression—
“to hell with the rest of the oppressed in the world, to
hell with the international proletariat”—but was,
in fact, something like “we have to advance the Chinese
nation to socialism and on to communism and we have to at the
same time support and do all we can to advance the world
revolution so that the people of the whole world and of all
nations advance to communism, too.” I think that was a
genuine view in Mao but it is not fully the correct view.

Under Mao—and not just out of the mouths of
revisionists—one can find some instances of making not
just a diplomatic (I was going to say ruse) tactic or necessity
of “we can’t export revolution”; sometimes it
was even said, “it is absolutely impermissible for one
country to touch a single hair on the social system of another
country,” etc. —to which you can only say,
why? And why not, why shouldn’t they touch more
than a single hair on the social system if it’s no good?
And in fact this stands out in opposition to some better
statements by Mao who at various times would say, for example
in the late ’50s, about the imperialists: we have our
people among them, the workers and other revolutionary and
progressive elements, and they have theirs among us, the
counter-revolutionaries, bourgeois rightists and so on. So
it’s uneven; but there was, I think, undeniably that
tendency, even though Mao called attention to the twists and
turns, the tortuous path, the need for the final victory of the
world revolution and really believed in and stressed those
things—he didn’t just say them as dressing or as
camouflage—there still is to a certain degree and despite
his overall tremendous contributions in the area of dialectics,
a certain linear or, to put it another way, country by country,
approach to revolution.

Without going into all of it, it’s not too difficult
to see that this was, in a certain way, a negation of the whole
way in which the attempt was made to impose the Soviet model
and the Soviet line at any given point on revolution everywhere
in the world which would have stamped out the Chinese
revolution. But it’s a one-sided and not a thorough
enough negation and not a thorough enough rupture forward in
opposition to that tendency.

And there is, along with this, a certain tendency recurring
in Mao to make a principle out of the policy of making use of
contradictions among the enemies, defeating the enemies one by
one. For example, this is put forward in a concentrated way in
his essay written during the anti-Japanese war, “On
Policy.”29 Making use of the contradictions
among the enemy, defeating our enemies one by one, etc., was
precisely a correct policy in those concrete
conditions and it can be, under many different conditions, a
correct policy. But it is wrong to elevate this to the level of
a general principle.

Just to give a simple example, if everybody in this room but
me is a counter-revolutionary and you constitute the main
pillars of reaction in the world and I’m capable of
whipping up on everybody all at once, why should I defeat you
one by one? There’s no principle that says I should
defeat you one by one; if I’m capable of defeating you
all at one time, I should just take you all on and wipe you out
and so much the better for the international proletariat. Now
on the other hand, if I’m not capable, if a materialist
dialectical analysis says that I can’t do that and an
attempt to do it, or even the attempt to take some of you on
and try to avoid the others, would lead to me being thoroughly
defeated and a setback for the international proletariat, then
I should figure out how to make use of contradictions and
together with the international proletariat (those not in the
room—not forgetting those not in the room) deal with you
one by one or at least differently in different situations and
not all the same, all at the same time.

But there was a certain tendency in Mao to make a principle
out of it. And while Mao was certainly not responsible
for the counter-revolutionary international line of the Chinese
revisionists in power now, there is on the other hand some
aspect of truth to their tracing of elements of the general
analysis of “three worlds” in the analyses made by
Mao during various periods going back, for example, to his 1946
interview with Anna Louise Strong30 where he lays
out the whole thing about an intermediate zone between U.S.
imperialism and the Soviet Union. Here Mao talks about the
countries (except the Soviet Union) immediately subjected to
the aggression of U.S. imperialism, lumping all of them,
including the imperialist countries, together. This involves a
frankly classless concept of aggression and, ironically, an
error in the direction of blotting out the distinction between
imperialist and colonial countries.

This is linked to the earlier point that because of the
character of China and its history, especially, though not
only, in its first stage of revolution, there was not the same
(or there was a relative lack of a) need for a radical or full
rupture with key parts of the wrong lines and deviations in the
line of the Communist International—deviations from
Leninism, particularly towards nationalism. For example, I have
to look more deeply into the full text of it, but having read
an excerpt from a law that was passed in the Soviet Union in
1934 on how traitors to the fatherland should be
punished,31 it’s rather striking when you see
the accompanying statement that for a communist, defense of the
fatherland is the highest principle. This is something that,
unless it’s a total distortion (because it is from a
bourgeois source), is rather strikingly wrong and a striking
deviation from Leninism toward nationalism.

In Section 7 of “For Decades...” a link is drawn
between some of these errors on the part of Mao and the
question of military strategy. In particular it talks about how
in China it was extremely important to fight for the line of
not striking out in all directions, not attempting to take all
the big cities at once, not fighting the enemy on that kind of
terrain with those tactics and policies, but drawing the enemy
in and encircling it, fighting battles to your advantage,
stressing at the first part of the war the strategic defensive,
etc.

I should point out in passing that in Mao
Tsetung’s Immortal Contributions32
there is a statement that’s carried too far, the
statement which refers to the fact that this policy of
Mao’s of stressing the defensive at the beginning of the
war has great relevance for oppressed nations, for socialist
countries that are invaded and generally for revolutionary
forces that start out smaller and weaker than the
counter-revolutionary forces. I think that’s true in the
first two cases but it can’t be correctly said that
it’s generally relevant—by which is meant
applicable—for all revolutionary forces that start out
relatively weak compared to the counter-revolutionary forces.
In an advanced capitalist country, the offensive right from the
beginning and maintaining of the offensive is extremely
important.

Here I should say that I’m not talking about military
strategy nor certainly military plans, I’m talking about
drawing out the political lessons that can be drawn from the
military strategy, although I think it’s important to
refer to a saying that the Chinese brought up in opposition to
the Soviet revisionists. It was a rhetorical question with an
obvious answer: can the emperors be allowed to burn down whole
villages and the people can’t even light lamps? By that,
what I mean in this context is that if the imperialists can
plot nuclear war, there’s no reason why we can’t
draw political lessons out of questions of military strategy.
And the political point that I want to draw in particular,
besides correcting that point in Mao Tsetung’s
Immortal Contributions, is refocusing attention on the
question of what is there in the military strategy Mao fought
for that might, spontaneously at least, lead him away from
understanding that in the context of a world war it might be
correct to in fact strike out in different directions, viewing
the world as a whole; that is, to oppose the imperialists in
general and to attempt to overthrow them wherever possible in
both camps, of course taking into the account the
particular situation in different countries.

Tactically, one bloc of imperialists or one imperialist
power might even be the main enemy in a particular country
while in another country, fighting in unity but through a
different path, it might be the other bloc or the imperialist
power heading the other bloc that is the main enemy, that has
to be immediately fought against, rather than trying to line
everybody up, peoples and countries together, against one bloc
of imperialists, allying with the other bloc with the socialist
country at the core of it. But the experience and strategy
forged in the military sphere in China might tend to lead
against that, because they had to fight so hard there, as
pointed out, against the very line of striking out at once in
different directions and attempting to take on a superior enemy
in battles where you were bound to lose; and (although not
accountable for it altogether) that may have fed into and
interpenetrated with this tendency to make an absolute out of
making use of contradictions, dealing with a superior enemy and
in that way defeating enemies one by one.

Especially since it is necessary to make these criticisms of
Mao, it is also necessary to restate and re-emphasize that Mao
was overall and overwhelmingly a great Marxist-Leninist leader
of the international proletariat and proletarian
internationalist. And while there may have been in Mao’s
analysis of world forces certain elements contained in the
“three worlds” theory, Mao was not only
not responsible for but fought relentlessly against
the reactionary line of capitulating to imperialism and
betraying revolution that has been embodied in the “three
worlds” theory as put forward by the revisionists now
ruling China, who have come to power precisely by overthrowing
Mao’s followers, and his line, after his death.

A question here: Since a lot of emphasis has been put on
deviations from Leninism, specifically towards nationalism,
would Lenin too have made these deviations from Leninism if
he’d been around longer to deal with a lot of the real
necessity that arose in the Soviet Union? Well, I don’t
know, but precisely it does depend on how he handled the
sharpening of the contradictions which he only lived to see the
emergence of; but it should be said, at the same time, that his
methodological approach, his grasp and application of
materialist dialectics, was head and shoulders (unfortunately)
above his successors in the Soviet Union, and in particular
head and shoulders above that of the main
successor—Stalin.

Returning to the question of Mao: also linked to the general
erroneous tendencies in Mao—too much of a country by
country perspective, the tendency to see things too much in
terms of nations and national struggle—something else
that should be reviewed here briefly is confusion and some of
Mao’s errors on the question of internal and external,
and in particular the internal basis of change and the external
conditions of change and how this applies in the relationship
between revolutions in particular countries, on the one hand,
and the overall world struggle and the world situation, on the
other. Here I don’t want to repeat everything
that’s presented in a fairly concentrated way in the
excerpt “On the Philosophical Basis of Proletarian
Internationalism” that appeared in March 1981 in the
Revolutionary Worker (issue No. 96), but just
simply to review again in passing towards some other points
that, even in Mao, despite and in contradiction to his
contributions to and development of materialist dialectics,
there were some metaphysical tendencies which interpenetrated
with nationalist tendencies on this question.

For example in “On Contradiction” the way
it’s presented is that China is the internal and the rest
of the world is the external. And what we’ve emphasized
in opposition to this is viewing the process of the world
historic advance from the bourgeois epoch to the communist
epoch as something which in fact takes place in an overall
sense on a world scale, is a world process and both arises out
of and is ultimately determined by the fundamental
contradiction of capitalism which, with the advent of
imperialism, has become the fundamental contradiction of this
process on a world scale. If we want to look to see what is the
underlying and main driving force in terms of the development
of revolutionary situations in particular countries at
particular times, then too we have to look to the overall
development of contradictions on a world scale, flowing out of
and ultimately determined by this fundamental contradiction and
not mainly to the development of the contradictions within a
particular country, because that country and the process there
is integrated in an overall way into this larger world process.
It’s not simply as it was in the feudal era or the
beginning of the bourgeois era where you had separate countries
more or less separately developing with interpenetration
between them; now they’ve been integrated into this
larger process. This was something that Lenin began to stress
with his analysis of imperialism but was not fully developed by
Lenin, at least in an all-around way and specifically in a
philosophical sense; and it was gotten away from very sharply
by the international communist movement after Lenin. And here
again it was a case where there was not a radical rupture in a
thoroughgoing way on the part of Mao.

All this, in turn, is linked with a wrong view of, or a
wrong method of dealing with, the question of the development
of conjunctures. It’s not that Mao totally failed to
grasp the question and the importance of conjunctures shaping
up; certainly he grasped this in a certain way in relationship
to World War 2, for example, and how that interpenetrated with
the Chinese revolution. But we have to understand how
Mao’s approach to such historic situations reflected
certain errors that go along with what I said earlier about
this orientation as set forth in “On Policy,” of
attempting to line up all the progressive forces, or all the
forces that can be lined up, against one main enemy, especially
in the face of a developing conjuncture like that and in
particular of a world war.

We also have to guard against a view that can develop
spontaneously in the movement of presenting the course of the
Chinese revolution as a “model” in the incorrect,
metaphysical sense. In the main—although there are, very
secondarily, some tendencies toward this in Mao—he
overwhelmingly struggled against just such an error. But still
it crops up and it goes along with the kind of error
we’ve criticized in our own thinking, a notion of the
“typical” motion of spirals or the
“typical” development of things under
imperialism.33 In particular, there is a tendency
toward a kind of absolute, mechanical, metaphysical view that
there are two types of countries in the world and one of them
has one-stage revolutions and the other has two-stage
revolutions and the way you make revolution in a country that
has a two-stage revolution is the way they did it in China,
more or less, with some concrete application to
conditions in your country; that is, you put forward new
democracy as your program, you go to the countryside, surround
the cities from the countryside, wage protracted people’s
war and eventually capture power. I’m not saying that
there’s not a lot to that. First of all, there is a lot
of concrete living reality and importance to the fact that
there are two different types of countries in the world. But as
Lenin said, these boundary lines are conditional and relative,
not absolute; and, despite the general distinction, whether the
revolutions there proceed in one stage or two is also relative
and conditional, not absolute, and overall it is more
determined by what’s happening in the world as a whole
than it is by what’s happening in one country.

For example if the revolution in Germany had preceded
revolution in Russia they would have handled the peasantry
differently in the Soviet Union. They would have been able to
handle it differently and there is no principle that says that
they have to be nice to the peasantry, that’s not the
point. They would have been able to be “nice” to it
in a different way. That is, they would have been able to
neutralize and win over much of the peasantry without having to
do a lot of things they did because they would have had a
stronger material basis and therefore a stronger political
basis. So these matters are not absolutes.

Furthermore Mao talked about how the anti-Japanese war was a
long phase of preparation for the final victory of the Chinese
revolution and he even put this in one of his characteristic
ways by thanking Japanese imperialism for invading China and
thereby hastening the Chinese revolution. Well of course
that’s not the way he really looked at it and if
you’re Enver Hoxha you wouldn’t get what he meant.
But the point is precisely that when Mao went to the Chingkang
Mountains in 1927 he did not know they were going to have an
anti-Japanese war. Now it was correct to go to the countryside
then and I’m not calling that into question. But it could
have turned out differently, so that it would have been correct
to come down out of the mountains.

It’s not an absolute that they had to stay in the
countryside for 20 years. The way things turned out it was
correct and I’m not introducing agnosticism or
relativism, but precisely because things are not predetermined,
don’t have a “typical motion” and because
things do more get determined on a world scale, it was not
preordained that they should have stayed in the countryside or
up in the mountains for 20 years. Now, again, what I’m
saying here does not negate the essential distinction between
the two basic types of countries and two types of revolutions,
nor the point stressed in “Basic
Principles...”34 that the countryside,
political work and struggle and the role of armed struggle in
the countryside is generally of great importance in the
colonial and dependent countries. What I am urging is the need
to have a dialectical-materialist and internationalist method
and outlook in approaching the question of how to make
revolution in particular countries and how that fits into the
overall world situation and the world revolutionary
struggle.

But there is the specific criticism to be made of Mao on the
question of nations, national struggle and the world
revolution: not only in the Anna Louise Strong interview and in
“On Policy” but also in the General Line
polemic,35 the tendency shows up to see things too
much country-by-country separated from each other, too much in
terms of nations and national struggle, and too much in terms
of identifying one enemy and rallying everybody against it. In
the case of the General Line polemic, U.S. imperialism was seen
as the main enemy at that stage and in the other imperialist
countries the advice was to struggle against the monopoly
capitalists and reactionary forces who betrayed the national
interest, in other words who were allying with U.S.
imperialism; overall this was not correct, even though from an
historical standpoint and in terms of the contribution they
made to the struggle against revisionism and imperialism those
General Line polemics should definitely be upheld.

The point precisely is that all this shows the need to learn
both from the positive and the negative and be determined and
deepen our ability to strengthen the application of the basic
methodology of materialist dialectics and Marxism-Leninism as a
science, including the critical scientific spirit of
Marxism-Leninism and yes, Mao Tsetung Thought. And all this is
especially important in light of the sharpening of the world
contradictions, and the shaping up of the historic conjuncture
we’re now entering on a world scale.

II. More on the Proletarian Revolution as a
World Process.

Here I just want to make a few points
briefly—specifically, more on the material basis of
proletarian internationalism. The article which I referred to
earlier was entitled “On the Philosophical Basis of
Proletarian Internationalism” because it dealt with the
question of internal and external (the internal basis and the
external conditions of change of a thing); but of course
philosophy is based on matter and the philosophical basis is
the reflection of the material basis. This is all linked to a
deeper grasp of this question of the fundamental contradiction
of the bourgeois epoch on a world scale and how all this is
integrated into this overall process; and further we
have to grasp how this applies even to the situation of
socialist countries existing during this period, that is, the
period of worldwide transition from the bourgeois epoch to the
epoch of world communism.

One of the main things that I’ve been grappling with
and that came out in the 1981 May Day tape36 and so
on is the problem, if you want to put it this way, of the
lopsidedness in the world. This is linked to the question of
the contradiction of the forces and relations of production on
the one hand, and this interpenetrating with the base and
superstructure, on the other—both within specific
countries, including socialist countries, and overall
principally on a world scale. And all this has much to do with
the complexity and tortuousness of the process of proletarian
revolution towards the advance of communism worldwide.

What do I mean by this lopsidedness? Lenin, of course,
insisted on the basic distinction between the handful of
advanced imperialist exploiters and imperialist states and the
great majority of the world’s people in colonial and
dependent situations. But the problem has developed in a more
acute way in the sense that in a handful of advanced countries
is concentrated—perhaps even in an absolute quantitative
sense, but certainly qualitatively—the advanced
productive forces in the world. In those countries, and not
unrelated to this, the proletariat, broad sections of it and
the masses generally, to put it in crude, simple terms, are
sometimes not that hungry and not that desirous a lot of the
time of radical change. There are strata and sections that are,
but it’s not that often that broad masses of people are
demanding radical change in the whole social structure. On the
other hand, there are vast areas of the world where the masses
are living in desperate conditions.

Now one of the things that really infuriates me about these
social chauvinists and people who say, “What’s the
difference, imperialist country or not imperialist country,
they’re all on the capitalist road and they’re all
developing capitalism, some are 100 years behind the others,
some of them are so many machines behind the others and so
forth,” is that it’s very easy for people sitting
in one of these imperialist countries, even in the European
imperialist countries, to say this. In these countries the
trains run all on time, trucks drive the goods from one end of
the country to the other and there’s an integrated market
(not that everything’s smooth and even, because
that’s not the way of anything, and certainly not of
capitalism) and if there’s a serious crisis the
unemployment rate is 8%. But in the vast bulk of the world 8%
unemployment would be a miracle—it’s 30 or 40% all
the time, let alone when there’s a really acute crisis.
And outside of a few pockets, these places are extremely
backward and the railroads don’t even reach to most of
the areas, much less run on time, and the goods aren’t
moving rapidly all over the country, and there is not an
articulated economy (in the sense of the advanced capitalist
economies where the linkages between different sectors and
between investment and consumption make for integrated national
economies).

It is an infuriating thing, this imperialist economist
chauvinism where people say capital is capital, what’s
the difference what the nationality of the capital is. They
think they’re being very profound talking about
production relations when they see it narrowly in a national
framework and don’t see that an extremely important
production relation for the world as a whole is the production
relation (which is what it is) between imperialism and these
oppressed nations. That’s also a production relation and
it’s a decisive one in the world as a whole and
it’s more important than the production relation between
a factory worker and a warehouse worker in the imperialist
countries.

In any case, on the one hand are these advanced countries
where most of the productive forces are concentrated but the
revolutionary sentiments and level of struggle of the masses
and consciousness of the masses is generally, and most of the
time—at least so far—not on a very high level.
Which is not at all the same—perhaps it does need saying
but shouldn’t—as the line that revolution is not
possible or there’s no real prospect for it, even now, in
these advanced countries.

And on the other hand, in most of the world the productive
forces are backward; such development of the productive forces
as there is is under the domination of finance capital and
imperialism internationally, which distorts and disarticulates
these economies. The people are in much more desperate
conditions, much more desirous of radical change; yet they are
also in much more backward, primitive conditions, much less
concentrated and socialized (about which there is in this sense
something fundamentally important) and frankly, while desirous
of change and capable of being rallied more readily to support
for revolution, generally the stage of revolution there is one
of bourgeois democracy, even if of a new type. And even if the
possibility exists, and we should stress the possibility and
not the certainty, that it can be developed under the
leadership of the proletariat (that’s another mechanical
law of revolution that needs to be declared illegal, namely
that any revolution against imperialism in those countries can
only be led by the proletariat), nevertheless, there’s a
problem. While people are desirous of radical change and can be
mobilized more quickly and readily for revolution, though not
without contradiction and not simply and easily but more
readily behind the banner of revolution, nevertheless the stage
of revolution and the content of revolution, even if it is
under proletarian leadership, generally corresponds to
bourgeois democracy and to the stage of national
liberation.

All this represents and makes for a further complication in
the process of proletarian revolution throughout the world. In
the West—and I am talking about the West in terms of the
imperialist countries, including the Soviet
Union—it’s proven to be more difficult in this
period to make revolution than in the East, the East being the
colonial and dependent countries in what’s been called
the “third world.” But it’s also proven to be
extremely difficult to lead and maintain revolution where it
can be and where it has been more readily made, and
there’s no easy way out of this.

Of course, if we succeed in making a qualitative
breakthrough (which it would be) in seizing power in one (or
more) of the imperialist citadels, that would in fact be a new
leap forward for the international proletariat and would create
new freedom, although we should have no illusions that making
revolution in an imperialist country means that the proletariat
when it comes to power will inherit that country and its
productive forces as they were, for example, five years before
the revolution began—and probably the world war too.
Nevertheless, that would still represent a qualitative leap of
a certain kind. But it would not and could not change the fact
or eliminate the problem that there is a further complexity
because of this lopsidedness as I’ve described and
referred to it.

All this then poses problems, yes, but what it also does, on
the other hand, is to heighten the importance of
internationalism and, at the same time, the importance of
grasping and deepening our grasp of the whole motion of spirals
leading to conjunctures when all the contradictions on a world
scale are concentrated and heightened, including the
possibilities for revolution. This is opposed to views which
either deny, fail to grasp or, if recognizing some of this,
deal incorrectly with the question of the spiral motion
internationally toward conjuncture, and oppose to it erroneous
notions such as those represented in the theory of general
crisis, the linear type views to which I referred earlier.

So this poses problems but it deepens and heightens the
importance of our understanding of imperialism and our need to
grasp this correct methodology and analysis precisely because,
as I said, even if gains are maximized at every
point—even at the decisive points of worldwide
conjuncture—not all will be won at once, in one
conjuncture or even, in all likelihood, in just a couple of
go-’rounds. Therefore, this problem of how to deal with
this lopsidedness, how to make the greatest breakthroughs and
then how to make socialist countries bases for the world
revolution is going to be with us and is going to assume very
acute form. We’re not going to be able to just wish away
the problems related to socialist states emerging in an
imperialist-dominated world. In all likelihood, whether or not
we make a breakthrough this time around in terms of a
revolution in one (or more) of these imperialist citadels, even
a relatively lesser one, there will still be these problems.
Whether or not such a breakthrough is made, we’re still
not going to be able to wave away the problem that
there’s going to be imperialist encirclement and that the
pressure, both material and ideological, that such encirclement
is going to exert on the proletariat in power and on its
socialist state will be immense.

It’s a problem of how to actually carry out
what’s been forged to a higher level in the Party’s
Programme, that is, carrying forward the socialist
transformation in that country (those countries) where
breakthroughs occur as a subordinate part of, not just a base
area in the abstract but as a subordinate part of, the world
revolution. That’s a question we have to begin grappling
with right now, precisely because if we carry out the correct
line with the correct methodology there may be—if not in
the U.S. then in some other imperialist citadel(s), and perhaps
in the U.S. itself—that actual leap forward of the
seizure of power when the question will be very much and
pressingly on the agenda. And, of course, these basic
principles apply and are crucial for the international
proletariat wherever (in whatever type of country) it makes the
breakthroughs and establishes socialist states.

But beyond that there is a particular question I want to
address: How far can you go within a single socialist country?
Just to say that it’s been proven and settled
historically that socialism is possible in one
country—even if we unbeg the question by coming to a deep
understanding of what socialism is and say that there is a real
socialist road and it’s possible to go and stay on the
socialist road, at least for a significant distance, to use the
analogy of a road—it still hasn’t even been settled
that it’s possible to have socialism in absolutely every
country under every circumstance. The fact that it’s been
possible to do it in certain countries in certain times
doesn’t prove it’s possible to have socialism in
every “one country” at all times. But even more
than that there is, I believe, and this is something I’m
trying to come to grips with, and only beginning to grapple
with, a limitation, though not an absolute limit in a
mechanical sense, on how far you can go in a single socialist
country.

Here I want to say that there’s been the old charge
that we’ve pled “not guilty” to and to which
now we have to plead “innocent as charged”:
that’s the old charge that’s been hurled in a
perverted way of course by the imperialists that socialist
countries in particular, as they frame it, have a need
themselves to expand and conquer more of the world or else they
run up against their limitations. And I think we have to plead
innocent as charged to that. For a long time we’ve been
denying it and pleading not guilty and charging slander. And
now I think we have to plead innocent as charged and by that,
of course, I’m talking about something qualitatively
different from the need of the imperialists for spheres of
influence to export capital, to exploit more people, to try to
transform the world in their image, or better said, distort it
under their domination.

We shouldn’t get metaphysical here either on the other
side, that is, be absolutist about the limitations on how far
you can advance in socialist transformation in one country.
But, still, there is a basic truth here and I’m not
talking about the need, as is actually imperialist slander, of
a socialist country as a country to have raw materials
and to dominate more territory and to get the resources and
people of different countries under its domination. I’m
not talking about that—that’s just the mirror the
imperialists are holding up to themselves.

In terms of maintaining power and advancing further on the
socialist road—and not just from the standpoint of a
socialist state but in particular from the standpoint of the
international proletariat—the question is much more that
there is a limit, as I said, to how far you can go in
transforming the base and superstructure within the socialist
country without making further advances in winning and
transforming more of the world; not in terms of conquering more
resources or people as the imperialists do, but in terms of
making revolutionary transformations. (This was just hinted at
and pointed to in a general way in that letter, “On the
Philosophical Basis of Proletarian
Internationalism.”)

As far as I understand it, the reason for this is, first of
all, that there is the ideological influence, as well as the
actual military and political and other pressure, from the
imperialist encirclement. But there’s also the fact that
this is the era of a single world process and that has a
material foundation, it’s not just an idea. What may be
rational in terms of the production, even, and utilization of
labor power and resources within a single country, carried
beyond a certain point, while it may seem rational for that
country, is irrational if you actually look upon a world scale.
And that reacts upon that country and becomes an incorrect
policy, not the best utilization of things even within that
country, and begins to work not only against the development of
the productive forces but, dialectically related to that,
against the further transformation in the production relations
(or the economic base) and the superstructure.

It is not possible to go on forever in a linear
country-by-country way, to go on a separate dialectic within
the socialist countries, even with its twists and turns, even
beating back at times capitalist restoration and supporting the
peoples of the world: at a certain point this is going to turn
into its opposite—for material reasons, as well as
interpenetrating with ideological and political and even
military reasons.

There’s a truth here which, correctly grasped with
materialist dialectics, strengthens proletarian
internationalism and can strengthen, if applied consciously,
the revolutionary struggle of the international proletariat
overall through its unavoidably long, tortuous path and
struggle marked by critical conjunctures, by sudden turns,
dramatic upheavals and leaps.

This calls to mind that in the Communists Are
Rebels37 pamphlet, this question is put to
the side, so to speak, and necessarily, overall, to focus on
specific contradictions that are concentrated on there. For
example, it simply says on page 11 in the pamphlet, “You
are familiar with our analysis of how the class struggle within
a socialist country interacts with the class struggle
internationally and the fact that the fight against capitalist
restoration in a socialist country and to achieve the advance
to communism can only be successfully carried out in unity with
the whole international revolutionary struggle and on a
worldwide basis,” which is not wrong overall, but at the
same time, as is shown in the differences, that is, the
advances from the Party’s draft Programme
and Constitution to their final versions, our
understanding of precisely this point has been developed even
qualitatively in a certain sense.

That is, we have sharpened our grasp of the fact that
proletarian internationalism is and must be the
foundation for the proletariat and its party in all
countries. Before power is seized this is a crucial question,
but even more so once power has been seized. And it’s in
the sense of all this that I say that we can and should
willingly and defiantly plead innocent as charged to this
allegation that we need to keep advancing and winning more of
the world, or else our gains will turn into their opposite.

III. Leninism as the Bridge.

By that I mean that in today’s situation Leninism is
the key link in upholding and applying Marxism-Leninism, Mao
Tsetung Thought. To put it somewhat provocatively, Marxism
without Leninism is Eurocentric social-chauvinism and social
democracy. Maoism without Leninism is nationalism (and also, in
certain contexts, social-chauvinism) and bourgeois democracy.
Now those may sound like nice little axioms but they apply, and
have real importance, and this is, in my opinion, a summation
from experience of some phenomena that exist in the world and
around which there must be deeper struggle.

Now, having said that, by way of a rather sharp and
provocative introduction, I want to say a few words more on the
question of revolutionary defeatism in terms of its opposite,
social-chauvinism. Just a brief comment in passing on reading
over a particularly outrageous point in Sooner or
Later38 and an article printed by an
Australian group which puts out a bulletin where they’re
having a debate on this very question of social-chauvinism and
the “three worlds” theory. Members of this
Australian group are generally supportive of Mao and against
the Chinese revisionists but they are apparently dividing
sharply between Leninist internationalist policy and
social-chauvinism, three worldism.

In one of the articles upholding the three worlds theory, as
in the Sooner or Later pamphlet, one of the most
nauseating things is to read this completely sophistic version
of “internationalism.” It says that it would be
extremely narrow and nationalist of us just to struggle against
our own bourgeoisie and not think about the whole world
situation and the whole world struggle, which translated means:
“It is narrow and nationalist of us to fight against and
try to overthrow our own imperialism, our own bourgeoisie; to
be internationalist we should support and prop up our
own imperialism and our own bourgeoisie.”

And in this Australian article it came out rather sharply
because the author went into a whole nauseating, syrupy
argument about how, “here we are and we’re being
exploited and oppressed by U.S. and Western imperialism and we
could easily forget all about the people in other parts of the
world who are being exploited and oppressed by Russian
imperialism and the fact that it’s posing the greatest
danger to the people of the world, and we could just think
about ourselves and the fact that our imperialism is exploiting
us—that would just be nationalism.” Immediately
what leapt to my mind is that the real problem such people are
focusing on is that “Russian imperialism is not giving
us any of the benefits of its plunder in the world,
but our imperialism is,” and this, translated
and boiled down to its essence, is the internationalism of
these people. But moving on...

I want to say a few words about national nihilism and
national pride. Here again is an example of where it’s a
fact that Lenin went against Leninism, even though we
didn’t say so in print, in publishing the national
nihilism article. But some people (in particular the
Marxist-Leninist Party, USA, formerly COUSML) did point out the
contradiction. They dragged out this article by Lenin in 1914
called “The National Pride of the Great
Russians”39 in which, instead of saying they
shouldn’t have any, he went into this whole attempt to
combine two into one, frankly. You can see the pressure was on
him: the war had just started and there was not only severe
repression for opposing the war but also a wave of patriotism
(chauvinism) that swept through Russia. Now Lenin doesn’t
go against the revolutionary defeatist line, he upholds that
line but he basically combines two into one in the sense of
saying basically that it’s because we have national pride
that we can’t stand to see Russia play this imperialist
role in the world and be under the domination of these
reactionary classes. Frankly, it’s almost down the line
the very arguments that he refutes, and rather powerfully, when
they are put forward by Rosa Luxemburg under the pseudonym
Junius, as exemplified in his article on the “Junius
Pamphlet”40 and, also, very powerfully and
slashingly in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade
Kautsky.41 But in this 1914 article Lenin
actually goes against the overall thrust of Leninism on this
crucial question.

As stressed before there is Leninism and there is Lenin, and
if Lenin didn’t always live up to Leninism, that
doesn’t make Leninism any less than what it is. And this,
in a certain way, harkens back to the point referred to earlier
on the general line put out by the Comintern—that is, the
united front against fascism line—because this very
article, “The National Pride of the Great
Russians,” and this very point were singled out and
harped on by Dimitroff and used to build up this whole line in
his report and the whole formulation of the united front
against fascism to single out the fascist states as the main
enemy.

In an imperialist country, the national banner is held
firmly by the imperialists. Underlying this is a very important
point of Marxist-Leninist political economy. Imperialist
capital must operate on an international plane; it requires
this as a condition of its reproduction. And it does at times,
as Lenin pointed out, speed up economic development in some of
the backward countries. But this occurs in the framework of
domination and oppression and, closely related, for all its
“internationalism,” imperialist capital remains
profoundly national and anchored in its national market,
and thus has a profound material stake in defense of the
interests of its nation. This is a crucial point analyzed and
developed in a thoroughgoing way in the forthcoming
America in Decline.42

I think that the line put forward in the article in
Revolution, “On the Question of So-Called
‘National Nihilism,’” is not only correct but
extremely important to grasp and to deepen. There have been
serious problems on this, even among the best in the
international communist movement, and there needs to be further
destruction and radical rupture. It’s a process
we’ve only begun and we have to forge further ahead under
the glorious ideological banner of “national
nihilism.” Now that’s a central point about which a
lot of people, either from the direction of so-called
“Marxism” and so-called “Maoism,” not
only disagree but will openly often attack Lenin for, saying
that Lenin is now passé or that this doesn’t apply
any longer.

Similarly with the phenomenon of economism, imperialist
economism in particular, which is a phrase Lenin used a little
bit differently than I’m using it here, but with
basically the same central point in mind. He used it from the
standpoint of referring to people who denied the right of
political independence to oppressed nations, particularly the
colonies. These imperialist-economists tried to bolster their
arguments by pointing to the truth that no country unless it
was really socialist (and we can see now more clearly that not
even in an absolute sense is that true) but no country could be
free of the entanglements and the domination of finance
capital, at least in a qualitative way, unless it was
socialist. From this truth they made the opportunist leap to
saying that there was no use in talking about political
independence and national liberation.

Lenin called this “imperialist economism” and
said these people were incapable of grasping the dialectic
between politics and economics and how in fact the question of
the struggle for national liberation, in the colonies
particularly, was extremely important and couldn’t be
negated on the basis that ultimately it was impossible to be
really independent without breaking completely with the
domination of imperialism (finance capital) in the economic
sphere. But here we’re using the term, (though I
won’t go into it at real length since other things are
being discussed and written about this) in a little bit
different light, particularly with respect to those people who
downplay the role of politics and internationalism in the
imperialist countries.

Let’s face it, economism is bad enough in any form,
and even where the masses are suffering desperately, where the
economic struggle takes on a much more acute form and becomes
the struggle of people for bread, for fuel and literally to
survive and has much more potential to become a sharp struggle
and become part of a revolutionary uprising or revolutionary
movement among the masses and to contribute to that movement,
even in those conditions, which existed in Russia when Lenin
was struggling against economism, all the things that Lenin
stressed about economism are true. But it’s so much the
worse when you’re talking about it in an imperialist
country with not only a powerful labor aristocracy, but broad,
thoroughly bourgeoisified strata, where it would be stretching
it to even describe a lot of the so-called economic struggle as
struggle, and certainly stretching things to call it
any kind of significant struggle.

In that context, to preach economism to the workers and to
focus their attention on the narrow sphere of their relations
with their employer, or even frankly on the narrow sphere of
their relationship with their own bourgeoisie, without focusing
their attention on the world as a whole, is what I call
imperialist or chauvinist economism. Such
imperialist economism not only limits the movement to reformism
but leads it into the service of counter-revolution,
particularly the more so if it’s a conscious policy. In
fact, with regard to imperialist countries, if one takes the
standpoint of the nation, especially in view of what was said
earlier about lopsidedness and international production
relations, it might be better to remain imperialist. But if one
takes the stand of the proletariat—which can only mean
the international proletariat—it would be better to make
socialist revolution and turn an imperialist country into a
base area for the advance of world revolution and the advance
to communism. The point is not to blame the workers, even the
backward ones, who are spontaneously economist, but to blame
the communists who tail behind this and who promote this in the
name of the working class and socialism and communism.

And here’s just sort of a side point. Lenin, you know,
raised the point in What Is To Be Done?: what is
there in common between terrorism and economism? And Lenin was
very clear that communists oppose the methods of individual
terror, assassinations, etc. And genuine communists do oppose
that, but they oppose it not because these things are
super-revolutionary, as their adherents sometimes insist and as
their bourgeois opponents sometimes claim, but because, in
fact, they are not ultimately revolutionary, do not lead to
revolution and are not a strategy for revolution. It’s
not a question of condemning them, it’s a question of
recognizing and struggling against them as tendencies, because
they are not a strategy for revolution and can’t lead to
revolution.

This is true even of those variations that attempt to take
on an additional dimension and link up with anarcho-syndicalist
tendencies and try to talk about the transformation of society
and struggle more broadly than in just the military sphere, but
which have in common with the economists, whether in capitalist
or in socialist society, the fact that they leave aside, or at
least significantly downplay, the crucial question of the
superstructure, of politics, ideology, world affairs and
internationalism. And as I said, there are those people who
sometimes from the terrorist side and sometimes from the
economist side (or often a combination of both), even if they
talk about revolution in all society or even the world
revolution at times, reduce things to the narrowest sense of
how to transform production relations and how to control, even
sometimes literally, a single factory and precisely leave aside
and downplay the critical question of politics, ideology, world
affairs and the superstructure—which is where these
questions are in fact concentrated and fought out in a
concentrated way.

That’s a side point but an important one because this
question of where do you concentrate the attention of the
workers, as I said, is important in all countries. Economism is
bad anywhere. But especially in the imperialist countries,
downplaying the question of the superstructure, politics,
ideology and focusing the attention of the workers narrowly on
the sphere of their relationship with their own employers or
even their own bourgeoisie and their own state is in fact a
recipe for turning the workers against the rest of the
international proletariat. Whether that’s done with
revolutionary rhetoric or even acts which in the form of
terrorism take on a revolutionary appearance, still, at the
essence and at bottom, it is a question of narrowing the
workers’ sights and turning them, not only away from
revolution in general but against the rest of the international
proletariat.

Now, I want to briefly touch on the question of the party,
which is a much and, I would have to say, continually
underrated point down to today in our own history. In
concluding I will return to it in a little more depth. What
I’m attempting to do here is sketch out some of the key
points of Leninism that in fact make it the bridge, and what I
mean by the bridge is precisely the bridge between Marxism and
Mao Tsetung Thought, what today is the key link in giving
Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought its overall integral
character and synthesis as the science of revolution and the
revolutionary ideology of the proletariat.

It’s in this context that I’m leaping from the
point of revolutionary defeatism versus social-chauvinism and
the question of focusing the workers’ attention on the
question of politics and world affairs in opposition to
economism, in particular to imperialist chauvinist economism.
These are crucial points around which people who claim to be
Marxists, claim to be Marxist-Leninists, even claim to be
Maoists frequently coalesce and make a stand in opposition to
Leninism in one form or another, and often openly. And after
all, the party is a sphere where Lenin’s contributions
and the Leninist line have been a qualitative advance in
Marxism and the struggle of the international proletariat.
Therefore, not surprisingly, it’s also a sphere where,
from the “classical Marxists” or the newborn
“Maoist” forces, there is often sharp and bitter
struggle in opposition to the Leninist line.

From the angle of the “Marxists,” a lot of them
reject the Leninist party and see in it, as I’ll come
back to a little bit later, the germ or the seed or the basis
of the whole degeneration of the revolution in Russia, they see
in it a dictatorship of the party and of a handful of
bureaucrats. On the other hand, there are those so-called and
pretended “Maoists” who think that because of the
experience of the Cultural Revolution in China the basic
principle of the Leninist party, of democratic centralism and
so on, has been superseded and surpassed and is no longer
correct and applicable, and that some new form, that is, a new
bourgeois-democratic form, can be found in which to eliminate
in fact the role of the party. You will notice in that quote I
read earlier about the Paris Commune, Mao makes the point that
we have to have a party; even though he says sarcastically,
“I don’t care if it’s a communist party or
social democratic party,” he is talking about a communist
Leninist party and that’s clear, and we can say that
without fear of being confused with Enver Hoxha!

IV. Some Summation of the Marxist-Leninist
Movement Arising in the 1960s and the Subjective Factor in
Light of the Present and Developing Situation and the
Conjuncture Shaping Up.

One of the things about which there is a great deal of
confusion and therefore is a cause of demoralization to many
revolutionaries—more than is objectively
necessary—is the question of why the ’60s movement
receded into an ebb in the ’70s, speaking in broad terms,
and why and how the upsurge that characterized the ’60s
generally in the world and particularly in the “third
world” turned into its opposite not just in particular
countries, but in many aspects internationally.

This crucial question of what happened to the revolutionary
movement particularly from the mid-’70s on, and why
upsurges were not carried through, did not succeed fully, did
not realize the potential they seemed to have at a certain
point, and why generally there was an ability on the part of
different imperialist forces and revisionism and social
imperialism to regroup and to make some gains while the
revolutionary movement in an overall way went into a temporary
ebb, cannot be understood fully or resolved by looking at it
country-by-country and trying to figure out what happened to
the movement in this country and why didn’t we go further
here, or why were we set back there and so on. Again,
it’s another example of how things have to be looked at
first, foremost and fundamentally on an international
basis.

Here I just want to make a brief aside in relation to the
comrades in China who, assuming that they are genuine and
legitimate, have now apparently issued two
pamphlets.43 In this first pamphlet they sum up
their understanding, so far, of the reasons for the revisionist
triumph and the reversal in China: “Our reversal is the
reversal of the perseverance of the Chinese Communist Party on
the road of the Marxist-Leninist line, it is the reversal of
Mao’s revolutionary line of continuing the revolution
under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it is also a
reversal of the line of the revolutionary people of China and
the world of combating revisionism and preventing revisionism.
And also because of this, the more faults and mistakes we can
consciously discover and point out in a more concrete way, the
more beneficial for us it will be in taking warning from the
past to be more careful in the future. Thus these faults and
mistakes can be avoided, overcome and corrected one by one, so
that our revolutionary cause can go through a thousand forgings
and a hundred smeltings, and we can unyieldingly persist in
carrying it out to the end.”

It’s in this same spirit that I want to raise that I
think the essence of the problem was not addressed in that
particular pamphlet, and that in essence secondary questions,
and even in some cases erroneous analysis, were focused on and
utilized in attempting to sum up these errors. In particular a
certain circular and simplistic argument is made where
it’s suggested that the revolutionaries were too lenient
with the counter-revolutionaries and let them get out of the
net when they could have finished them all off with one blow.
Of course it would be nice to think that it was that simple and
that was the essential error that needed to be summed
up—and next time the proletariat has power we’ll
just learn how to cut off more heads and to finish more
counter-revolutionaries off at one stroke. But I think that
precisely without breaking out of this framework the
revisionist triumph cannot be understood.

Now it’s very important that it’s said in this
statement that the loss there is not just the loss of the
Chinese Marxist-Leninists or the Chinese people, but of the
international revolutionary people, the international
proletariat, and I don’t want to underestimate the
tremendous importance of a Marxist-Leninist stand and line
being taken and put out, even to the world, and the attempt
being made to forge a new Marxist-Leninist center there. What
I’m saying is in unity with that spirit, but attention
needs to be called to the deeper questions of why it was not
possible to be less lenient with counter-revolutionaries, why
it was not more possible to ferret out and to defeat more of
these at one blow, why compromises had to be made (and I
believe they did have to be made in many cases) with
vacillating elements or middle elements or centrist elements or
people who, in any case, when the struggle reached another
crisis or concentration point later on, proved to be
counter-revolutionaries and sometimes even leading
counter-revolutionaries. And, again, I believe the answer to
this doesn’t lie in the mistaken leniency of the
revolutionaries or their lack of vigilance or the lack of
military preparation on the part of the
revolutionaries—some of these things, some more than
others, may have real validity and relevance, some I think are
basically off, particularly the charge of leniency on the part
of the revolutionary leaders.

In any case, the answer to the reversal in China has to be
sought, yes, in terms of the subjective factor as well as the
objective factor, and it can’t simply be an analysis that
says, “Well, the international situation became more
unfavorable so the revolution was bound to go down the
drain.” But neither do I think it can ignore the
international arena; in fact it has to look mainly to
the international arena in terms of understanding the objective
factors contributing to the setback and, in terms of the
subjective factor also, has to look to the ways in which a
perspective of the whole international struggle was not
thoroughly enough upheld and how this error influenced
the terrain on which and the ground from which this battle was
waged. That’s not to say the leaders of this struggle, in
particular Mao and the Four and especially those two among them
who continued to uphold the revolutionary banner, were not, in
a basic sense and overall, internationalists. But to the degree
that they made errors it didn’t lie in the realm of
leniency against counter-revolutionaries, it lay in
shortcomings in how the relationship between the carrying
forward of the socialist revolution in China and the overall
world situation and world struggle was viewed and handled.

Just another point in connection with this for further
reflection. To put it somewhat provocatively in the form of a
question: what is there in common between Long Live the
Victory of Peoples’ War44 in the
mid-’60s and the “three worlds” theory as put
forward in Peking Review 45, the overall
theoretical statement, if we can call it that, in 1977? In
particular, what are some of the common points underlying them?
In one of the excerpts reprinted in the
RW45 from something I wrote in
connection with some of these questions the point is made, in
stressing the need to learn from the impatience of Mao, like
Lenin and Marx before him, that a lot of the views put forward
in Long Live the Victory of Peoples’ War,
including some of the errors, reflect not only Lin Biao’s
tendencies but, by and large—though not some of the worst
expressions—much of the thinking of Mao at that time. And
I think, on the other hand, while there is a qualitative
difference in every sphere, including the international line,
it is also true as noted earlier that certain elements of the
analysis—though certainly not the overall political line
nor the ideological line—put forward in the “three
worlds” document also reflects to a certain extent, some
of Mao’s thinking and some of Mao’s approach to
these problems.

If you read Long Live the Victory of People’s
War, it literally says that the touchstone, dividing
line between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in the
world at that time, is whether or not one dares to and does
wage people’s war against imperialism and whether one
really supports it or not. That was made the dividing
line, which in the particular circumstances then was a real
dividing line (whether it should have been made the fundamental
dividing line is at least questionable, but it was a real
dividing line). But then the world changed and I think one of
the things that happened was that the whole revolutionary
current that was sort of drawn around and had its leading
center in China and around Mao was frankly taken off guard by
and did not correctly respond in significant ways to the shift
in the whole world balance of forces. (This is not to invoke
the revisionist formulation, “balance of forces,”
but there is something to “world balance of forces”
viewed dialectically and materialistically.) The
revolutionaries were taken off guard by the shift in the
position, strategy and tactics and methods of the various
forces. It was not the case in the ’70s that the Soviet
Union’s way of opposing revolution in the world was
consistently, or even often, expressed in terms of refusing to
support armed struggles and liberation wars against
imperialism. In fact, especially through the ’70s as
things were changing in the world, they supplied weaponry and
gave material support in a big way to wars of national
liberation—not without pursuing their own bourgeois
interests even in narrow financial ways in many cases, though
in some cases they even did this at immediate financial loss,
having imperialist largeness of mind. But once the Soviet
revisionists decided to enter this arena and switched from
their policy of avoiding confrontation at all costs with the
U.S., even avoiding support for liberation wars in order to
avoid such confrontation, then they were able in a certain way
to provide a lot more materiel and equipment and to make more
headway with a lot of the non-proletarian leadership in many of
these movements than the Chinese were, at least in the short
run. And as the U.S. began to pull back from Vietnam, began to
regroup, as the Soviets began to have the necessity, and also
more possibility, to push out in the world, there was an
inevitable shift in the revolutionary movement in the
world.

This in particular had inevitable repercussions within China
in response to it. It has everything to do with the way in
which Mao came into contradiction with Lin Biao (and in which
Lin Biao came into opposition to Mao) and in the ways in which
Lin Biao’s view of the world was no longer able, or the
view put forward in Long Live the Victory of
Peoples’ War was no longer able, to draw a real
dividing line between Marxism and revisionism. And, on the
other hand, these changes in the world, part of the sharpening
conjuncture, became a framework within which some of the
erroneous tendencies on Mao’s own part led him into some
of the kind of errors that we’re familiar with—now
making the Soviet Union the main enemy and seeking to develop a
united front, similar to the anti-Japanese united front, but
now more broadly on a world scale, against the Soviet
Union.

In Long Live the Victory of Peoples’ War
it is said that U.S. imperialism on a world scale plays the
role that Japanese imperialism played in China in World War 2.
It isn’t a very far leap from that, although it’s
carrying the error further and making it worse in the concrete
conditions of the ’70s, to say that the Soviet Union has
become the main enemy on a world scale and that other forces
should be allied with against the Soviet Union. What’s
missed here, what this and Long Live the Victory of
Peoples’ War have in common—and this becomes
sharper again and more of a problem in the ’70s as things
do sharpen up—is that they fail to correctly grasp the
spiral motion and development toward conjunctures. In that
light in particular, both Mao’s later views and
Long Live the Victory of Peoples’ War see
the prospects for revolution as existing almost entirely in the
“third world” and particularly do not correctly
grasp the importance of the heightening of the contradictions
and their gathering into a knot in the conjuncture. An
underestimation of the possibilities for revolution in the
imperialist countries is an error that is, on the one hand,
common to both Long Live the Victory of Peoples’
War and the “three worlds” theory but stands
out more sharply in the more recent context of the actual
development toward a world-wide conjuncture and toward
heightened possibilities for revolution in the imperialist
countries, which don’t arise that often and which,
therefore in a certain sense, take on all the more importance
at times like this, and it is all the more of an error to miss
or underestimate this.

But having said that, it is also important to reaffirm what
was said in that excerpt referred to earlier, entitled
“What’s Wrong with Impatience in the Service of the
International Proletariat”—this certainly applied
to Mao in the 1960s, as reflected even in Long Live the
Victory of Peoples’ War, as well as Lenin and Marx
before him. But more than that this obviously must apply to and
be applied by people who are upholding and are carrying forward
Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought now, because there is a
need to stress again that the present and developing situation
and the sharpening of the contradictions towards a conjuncture
on a world scale represents heightened opportunities, as well
as heightened difficulties and necessity.

And it’s not as if we’re talking in a vacuum or
simply wishing for revolutionary elements to appear! These
elements are already asserting themselves and
developing. On the one hand, this is the case even in the sense
of the trouble of both superpowers and both imperialist blocs
in getting it together for the confrontation between them. This
shows up all the time, for example, in such ways as the
acuteness of how the nuclear issue poses itself in Europe and
the kind of movement that this is giving rise to. Even if we
take into account that the revisionists are attempting to fish
in these waters, nevertheless the resistance is much broader
than that. Or look at the ways in which the U.S. imperialists
have real difficulty in holding their bloc together and
overcoming or mitigating the very sharp contradictions within
it. Thus the contradiction between the reactionary Arab states
and Israel is one that not only consistently asserts itself but
is always assuming new and different forms. Of course, the
perverted logic of these Sooner or Later types who
have been declaiming against how the Soviet Union has
everything going for it and the U.S. has all this trouble will
now, as the Soviet Union starts having ever more open
difficulties, just say “ Good, that makes it so
much the better for the united front.” But from a
Marxist-Leninist and proletarian internationalist standpoint it
is a very good thing that both of these imperialist blocs, and
both of these superpowers in particular, are having tremendous
difficulty before the thing has even come to a head.

And it’s not like we have to invent or search
desperately for the favorable elements already developing
beyond that sort of positive negative (the positive
developments in a negative sense), that is, the difficulties of
the enemy in merely pulling and holding their blocs together.
There’s also the more directly positive element of the
mass upsurges, the resistance, even revolutionary movements and
struggles in both the Western and the Eastern bloc. The U.S on
the one hand has El Salvador, the Soviet Union has Poland and
Afghanistan.

Against these developments in particular, as well as the
sharpening of the overall situation, the weaknesses in the
subjective factor on an international scale and within the
different countries stand out. But I hasten to add, this is not
the time for handwringing, moaning, weeping and so on about the
crisis of the Marxist-Leninist movement. As the Basic
Principles document stresses, it’s a time for
stepped up efforts—on all levels and in all spheres,
theoretical and practical and the dialectical relationship
between the two—to rise to the challenges and
opportunities. And this is not mere rhetoric or routine calls
to communist duty.

Let’s just take a few examples of the real challenges
before the movement internationally and in the various
countries, the rebellions in Great Britain and Northern
Ireland; add to that the youth revolts, even the uprisings with
anarchist trends in Western Europe in particular; all these are
both an inspiration and a challenge. And it’s precisely
not easy to give Marxist-Leninist leadership to movements and
struggles of this kind and it’s also not easy to forge
and develop and temper a Marxist-Leninist force, that is a
party.

It should be said in terms of giving Marxist-Leninist
leadership, that one of the reasons it is not easy is precisely
that it means not suffocating but channeling the revolutionary
sentiments and upsurges that are reflected here, channeling and
developing and leading all these different strands toward
proletarian revolution. But our basic orientation should be
infused with the kind of thinking that would cause us to ask
the question: How could anarchists be more revolutionary than
Marxist-Leninists? It is not that these people are somehow too
much out of control and too revolutionary. In fact there is
nothing more revolutionary than Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung
Thought, if it’s really that and it’s
really that synthesis.

We have to find the ways of linking up with and giving
Marxist-Leninist leadership, the ways to give real and full and
the deepest revolutionary expression to these upsurges and
forces that are newborn and coming into existence now. And
while not looking to the past and focusing our attention there,
but precisely looking to the future, we also have to find the
way to make a call and to bring forward many of the best, both
the best people and the best tendencies that were expressed in
the ’60s, precisely again, in light of the present and
developing situation. All this is closely linked to our vision,
to put it that way, of socialism and the transition to
communism, as well as our summation—not a one-sided
negation and in fact upholding an historical, sweeping view of
the tremendous gains and at the same time grasping the lessons,
positive and negative, of the Soviet experience and the Chinese
experience and our historical experience in proletarian
revolution and socialist transformation, overall. This is
linked with the ability to draw forward the best in terms of
people, in terms of forces, in terms of sentiments and in terms
of political expression that arose in that period of upsurge in
the ’60s, and the necessary task of merging and fusing
all that into the present, linking it with the present upsurge
and the newborn forces.

All this is crucial in terms of the coming storm, because
this coming storm will precisely not be an idealist or an
idyllic vision or dream; whatever its particular features, it
will be full of destruction and horror—and the more so,
it has to be said, if advances of the revolution in the world
don’t develop far enough fast enough to actually prevent
world war. What was stressed in that little article
“Crowns Will Roll on the Pavements”46 is
exactly what the situation will be like. We’re not
talking about something pretty, but there still is the question
of seizing and wrenching the future—or as much of an
advance toward it as is at all possible—out of all the
madness and destruction that will be there. This is precisely,
if we’re going to grow up, what we should grow up to.

This requires—and we should really grasp this
generally as in the field of culture—a synthesis of
revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism, a
synthesis that lies precisely in the living science of
Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought. Somehow we have to find
the ways to take this out, both to the newborn forces and also
to the best tendencies, the best expressions, the best forces
and the highest aspirations that were called forth in the
upsurges of the ’60s in the various countries and on a
world scale, and infuse these with a real living, scientific
content and in that way synthesize them and lead people forward
to proletarian revolution, to wrench literally out of all this
madness and horror as much of the future as at all possible.
It’s this kind of challenge, this kind of task that lies
before the subjective factor, that is, the conscious
revolutionary forces: to go as far as possible and to bring the
subjective factor as far as possible in line with the
development of the objective situation and the possibilities,
the opportunities it poses within the different countries but
overall on an international scale.

To return to an aspect of this for one second, I think the
point needs to be driven home about the ’60s, and
particularly the ebb of the ’70s, that a summation of
that is not simply a question and should not be seen in the
light of consoling those people who wonder where all that went,
or trying to pluck up the courage of those who are somehow
still dragging on forward from the burst of energy they got
then, yet are now running out of gas. But, on the other hand,
it is crucial to make a scientific summation of that by
focusing on the lessons that we’ve been drawing out and
have been attempting to zero in on here, particularly looking
at the international arena, the development of these
contradictions on a world scale, the shift that took place in
the international arena at that stage and how it affected the
movement and the tendencies of that time. Why the Soviet Union
was able to come forward in a certain way and make headway
where before they had lost ground? On the other hand, why China
and the line pursued by China, even the revolutionaries in
China, ran into temporary and new difficulties and how do we
understand the incorrect responses to that? How within the
particular countries, for example just to take the
U.S.—and certainly it can’t be understood
outside this context—the bourgeoisie was able to respond
to the upsurges of the time and how the shift internationally
affected the movement that erupted around the Vietnam war? How
the bourgeoisie was able to maneuver, not only through
repression, but also in bringing forward petty-bourgeois forces
and building them up, for example within the Black liberation
movement (which is an element we haven’t focused in on
enough in terms of summing this movement up)?

We must analyze how all these different things—not
just within the particular countries but focusing, first of all
and fundamentally, on the international arena and then looking
within that to the various countries—how on the one hand
things came together in a certain way to lead in general to a
temporary ebb (not uniformly and in every place in the same way
and to the same degree, but generally an ebb); and yet, how
there has never been, on the other hand, even in the
’70s, a quiet moment or a time when in some part of the
world there wasn’t upsurge and struggle, and how already
by the end of the ’70s there were revolutionary movements
once again shaking the foundation of imperialism in key and
various parts of the world.

Imagine, for example, what it would have been like if the
revolutionary line in China had been more clearly and firmly an
internationalist one and, on that basis, if the revolutionary
leadership had been able to mobilize the proletariat to keep
power in China—which such a line could not have
guaranteed but would have made more possible—and then
things erupted the way they did in Iran, think about where we
would be on that basis now! But even without that, even with
the loss in China, think about Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador,
Poland, Afghanistan, England, Ireland, other parts of Europe,
the resurgence beginning in the U.S. and, for god’s sake,
in New Zealand! I hope this is not taken for chauvinism against
New Zealand but… nobody, even people in New Zealand,
expected that and that just proves the point. And precisely
what it proves is that a summation of why there was a temporary
ebb will arm us and equip us to be much better able to seize
the opportunities that are sharpening and already are breaking
through the surface, not just in one place, but in one place
after another, even if not without contradictions
certainly.

So to the last point:

V. Some Questions Related to the Line and
Work of Our Party and Our Special Internationalist
Responsibilities.

First of all, a point on how to evaluate the battles around
May 1st, the Revolutionary Worker and
internationalism (internationalism on the one hand is an
integral part of our overall work, certainly of May 1st and the
Revolutionary Worker but, on the other hand, it is
a key focus in its own right as well). I would like to make an
analogy to the Great Leap Forward in China which also had its 3
banners of the Great Leap Forward, the people’s communes
and the general line for moving socialism forward. This is not
an exact comparison and I don’t want to encourage
mechanical thinking, metaphysics, forcing analogies, cutting
the toes to fit the shoes, and so on, but I’m still going
to make the analogy which is that in a certain sense we also
had our 3 banners: May 1st, the Revolutionary
Worker and internationalism. And to be clear about it,
my impression is that there’s a lot of struggle still
going on about: “did we really make leaps?” just
like in China— “was there really a Great Leap
Forward or was it a fiasco?” (Mao made the point in the
middle of the struggle over the Great Leap Forward that Chin
Shih Huang built the Great Wall in China and then he was
overthrown, and now we’ve had the Great Leap Forward, are
they going to overthrow us for that too?)

It seems to me that there’s a question of how to
evaluate these things and I think you can look at it this way.
Mao talked about all the excesses and problems of the Great
Leap Forward and how everything didn’t work out the way
that the revolutionaries were struggling to make it work out: a
lot of the advances couldn’t be kept on the level they
were, some couldn’t be consolidated at all, to take just
one example, a lot of the canteens which they were trying to
use to push things forward to more socialized forms of
distribution collapsed and couldn’t be maintained. Mao
said, for example, I thought that steel could walk by itself, I
forgot about the problem of transport, getting so carried away
with trying to produce so many tons of steel. But the important
thing, he said, was that the masses were mobilized and their
political consciousness and activity was aroused and
raised.47 Drawing the analogy we’re all
familiar with of the Paris Commune, saying that Marx thought
the Commune would be good, even if it only lasted a short
period of time because it was the first proletarian
dictatorship, Mao remarked that if you assess it from an
economic standpoint the Commune wasn’t worthwhile
either.

The way I feel about it, we set out with the basic target in
1980 to have 10,000 people, mainly from the working class, out
there leaving work, rallying and demonstrating on May 1st and
making that kind of impact on the country and the world. And we
fell short in a quantitative sense of that goal. We set out
after that, in trying to go forward from there, to expand
distribution of the Revolutionary
Worker on a regular basis to 100,000 weekly and it
appears now that we’re falling short of that and we have
to consolidate on a lower level. And, we set out to make
internationalism a clear line and standard in the movement, and
I can’t think of too much bad to say about that, we
haven’t done so badly at that, it seems, although there
are still some backward forces who think we should talk about
petty reforms or maybe psychological space and other equivalent
problems.

But let’s take the question of May 1st and the
RW. On the one hand, we
set out to reach this May 1st target quantitatively at 10,000
and there is an interpenetration with quality. We didn’t
succeed in that goal of 10,000, but we did succeed in making
May 1st a big social question inside the proletariat in the
U.S., even with international implications, not just among the
left “movement,” many of whom tried to ignore it or
slander it, but especially among a good section of the masses,
especially in the more advanced masses in the U.S. We did
succeed in making that a big social question and in making a
big impact politically on that day and then again the next year
on May 1st. And we succeeded so well that we actually have a
tactical problem, because this coming year May 1st falls on a
Saturday and we don’t know what to do. In a certain funny
way that’s a measure of whether or not and to what degree
and how in fact we did make an advance. And May 1st is
a big social question, especially in the more solid social base
for a proletarian revolutionary internationalist line;
it’s something that already, I’m sure, people are
looking forward to and increasingly will be; it’s become
a day where the question of revolution is put center stage, not
literally in the majority of people’s thinking, but on
the minds of large numbers of people and with an impact on even
still broader numbers.

In terms of the RW, we didn’t succeed
apparently in being able to consolidate on the level of
100,000. It is sort of like Mao with the steel: we went out
there and put it out boldly to the masses and put the
newspapers literally on the street and called the masses
forward to take them, and there were inspiring examples over
and over again of that happening. But, you know, like Mao said,
he forgot that steel couldn’t walk and apparently we
forgot that papers don’t pay for themselves. So we ran
into some problems where we weren’t able to consolidate
on that level and maintain the distribution on that level, but
we are going to be able to come out of it with a real leap
quantitatively and, more than that, qualitatively. First off,
the Revolutionary Worker and the whole central
task has taken a qualitative leap in terms of our own
grasp and application of it. And secondly the whole trend as
concentrated around the newspaper and as represented by the
Party has become a much broader force, a material and
ideological force among growing numbers of the masses. If
before, the central task was much less grasped and very much
more unevenly applied, through the whole struggle, including
the 100 Flowers campaign, it certainly is true in a
qualitatively greater sense that the central task and the work
around the newspaper and the whole line it represents have
become much more a real force, both in terms of our own grasp
and application and in terms of its impact among the masses.
[The “100 Flowers campaign” refers to a debate in
the pages of the Revolutionary Worker in 1980 over
the central task and, in particular, the role of the
newspaper.]

Similarly with internationalism. We have actually made
internationalism a question throughout the U.S. and with an
impact throughout the world; literally with no exaggeration it
is an inspiration to people from all over the world that right
in the heart of the U.S. there is an internationalist force. We
made internationalism a decisive question, a question taken up
by people who come into struggle around particular questions or
issues, and a question to which generally broader forces,
including in the “movement,” have to respond or
have to deal with. So I feel that we can find a narrow basis
for assessing these things and saying they weren’t
worthwhile, but from any Marxist-Leninist standpoint, from any
view of correctly assessing our overall goal, these were not
only worthwhile but were indeed real important qualitative
leaps that have to be built off.

Just to go back to the last point about internationalism and
the full point about how the newspaper and the central task
have taken a qualitative leap in theory and in practice, I
think that the trend, as represented by our Party and as
concentrated in the newspaper, has become a real political
trend in the U.S. (from everything I can gather) and
that’s a growing thing, it’s not just a flash in
the pan. Now I would like to say that I think we should sharply
contrast our trend not only to straight up bourgeois politics,
but also, rather than simply contesting the phony communists
and saying “they’re not communists, we’re
real communists,” we should to a certain degree and in a
certain context, let the revisionists have the
“communist” banner. And what we should say is,
“yes, there are different tendencies: there’s the
socialists and the social democrats, some of them are in power
in different countries, you can see what they do, they’re
more or less a straight up bourgeois trend; then there’s
the communists, that is, the revisionists, they’re in
power in some countries too, and in other countries they want
to be in power on the same basis, you can see what
they’re about; and then there’s our trend, which is
the revolutionary communist/proletarian internationalist
trend.” I say this not at all facetiously.

To a certain degree the revisionists have the banner of
communism—well, to a certain degree and only to a certain
degree, we should say “yes, there’s the social
democrats and the socialists, there’s the communists,
(that is the revisionists), and there’s the revolutionary
communist/proletarian internationalists,” and push that
trend out and make it even more of a force in that kind of way.
Because that in a certain sense is breaking more out of doing
this all within a more narrow context, and seeing the question
of that trend becoming a big trend and an actual pole around
which will gravitate and rally the advanced forces who are
taking up revolution and internationalism more consciously.
That’s just something to think about…

I want to go back to this question of the Party and put it
in the context, in particular, of the central task and then
move on to conclude. The central task as we know is
encapsulated in the formulation, Create Public Opinion…
Seize Power. There’s a question of how to view this in
its broadest implications: What do you mean by a task, in
particular a central task, and what’s its relationship to
other tasks? The way I look at it, central task, in the sense
that we’re using it, is something which has to be viewed
in an overall way and it’s something which comprehends
all of the work that’s carried out in that
entire process of Create Public Opinion… Seize Power.

In other words, to me the central task is not creating
public opinion now and then, (tomorrow or at some point) we
will be seizing power. Nor can the central task be reduced to
the work around the newspaper as the main weapon that
we’re using now. The central task is precisely a process
(or corresponds to a process) which encompasses all the work we
have to carry out in creating public opinion and seizing
power—which, at different times and in different
circumstances, finds more or less emphasis on different aspects
of it, and includes a number of more specific tasks. Another
way that we put this is: “preparing minds and organizing
forces,” which, should be pointed out, we consciously
reversed from—and I hope genuinely rendered somewhat more
profound—Lenin’s formulation in an article where he
talked about organizing forces and preparing minds. We put the
two in the opposite relationship, preparing minds and
organizing forces, which is more in line with Create Public
Opinion...Seize Power. But viewing the central task in this way
enables us to grasp more firmly and deeply the role and the
importance of party building.

I see party building as being in very close dialectical
interpenetration with the overall orientation, the importance
of which I’ve come to see even more deeply, of what
I’ve formulated as “taking responsibility for the
movement as a whole,” that is, for the overall task of
building a revolutionary movement. This has been a strength of
ours historically, going back even to the Revolutionary Union
before the Party was formed, a strength that not even the
Mensheviks, and the conditions that made their influence grow
in strength, were able to extinguish, though they were
certainly able to suffocate and smother it to a significant
degree.

To stress the importance of party building and to give it
the kind of emphasis that unfortunately it has not been
given—certainly not consistently—in our own
understanding and in our own work, it must be said that Party
building is not only a key part of the preparation of
revolution; to put it another way, if you want to talk about
preparing minds and organizing forces, it is the key
part of organizing forces. The question need only be asked to
answer itself: how clearly and how consistently have we grasped
that and acted upon it as an organization overall?

This is very much linked in my mind to the question of what
a revolutionary situation looks like in terms of its complexity
and the diversity of the forces involved—the kinds of
things we’ve been trying to stress and that are spelled
out, or at least spoken to, in the Programme. Take
the problems that were posed for the Marxist-Leninist movement
in Iran with the upsurge and then the overthrow of the Shah,
and the aftermath of that down to the present. Here I’m
not talking in a narrow mechanical sense about the fact that
there wasn’t a party per se in Iran or putting emphasis on
organization narrowly. But due to the savage repression by the
Shah and other factors, the Marxist-Leninist movement there was
fragmented and diffuse so that it was not a powerful trend as
such within the society at the time when things developed to a
revolutionary situation and the actual overthrow of the Shah.
I’m not talking about already having the adherence of the
majority (or the majority of the working class), I’m
talking about being a major force politically in society as a
whole. And one only needs to look at that to see how much
further along the revolutionary movement would be in Iran were
the Marxist-Leninist movement and a clear Marxist-Leninist line
in particular, and an organized force representing that, much
more of a force in the upsurge which overthrew the Shah. Which
is not to get metaphysical and say, “only if we’d
had this…”; nevertheless, it is a way of
illustrating a point and urging us to maximize the freedom we
have and to take every correct step and necessary step to
greatly intensify and push forward our work in building the
Party.

Now this point has been strengthened from the draft
Programme and Constitution to the final. But
concentrated attention and work is needed on this point from
now forward. Attention needs to be focused on the question of
why, in party building, quality is the key link; and
that means in particular that line and the training of Party
members and those drawn toward the Party in theory and in
practice is the key link in party building. But also, and if
secondary, still extremely important and interpenetrating with
the qualitative aspect, is the question of building the Party
quantitatively. To put it in simple terms, building its
membership, bringing in new members continually, building up
the quantitative aspect of the Party is crucial to being able,
even first of all, to gauge the developments—specifically
the mood of the masses—toward a revolutionary situation
and of course to carry through whenever a revolutionary
situation does develop—which, as we’ve seen from
experience, can develop suddenly and without much
warning—and certainly without permission!

The question of the relationship between the party and an
overall upsurge in society has to be understood clearly. By
that I mean you can’t build the party in a hothouse, or
by will or self-cultivation, and generally you can’t
build the party, you can’t bring people in and around the
party—beyond a certain point in any case—in the
absence of a general ferment in society and a general growth of
the social movement and upsurge in society. I’m not
saying you can’t have a party and you can’t build
it at all, but there is a relationship there. And, again,
it’s not as if there isn’t any ferment in the world
as a whole and even in society in the U.S., in particular.

But with all that, there still is the basic truth and
principle that the party is in fact the vanguard, it is not the
same as and can’t be reduced to whatever the level of
struggle and consciousness is at any given time—even of
the advanced, let alone of the broadest masses. In line with
the central task and our understanding of it, as I touched on
before, we should be able to see more clearly the importance of
building the Party precisely as the vanguard, and this has to
be developed and strengthened both qualitatively and
quantitatively in correct relationship to political work among
the masses, social upsurges and social ferment, social
movements and social questions.

As I said, this is concentrated and comprehended in the
central task as correctly understood, but it has to be grasped
and acted upon that this is not only a key part of carrying out
the central task, or to put it another way, preparing minds and
organizing forces, but is the key aspect of organizing
forces. This question, too, has to be taken to the masses, both
in the form of addressing it openly in a concentrated way in
the newspaper, and also not in a hothouse but precisely in
correct and dialectical relationship with the growing ferment
and upsurge in society and in the world, it must be made a
question and a challenge particularly to the advanced who come
forward, and especially from the proletarian masses.

The trend as represented especially by the newspaper has to
be more than just a loose trend and a general sentiment; it has
to have organized expression. People inside our own ranks and
more broadly, particularly those who do gravitate towards this
trend, have to grapple with and come to terms with the question
that whether or not we can actually “do the dog,”
as we say, and whether or not we can, in any case, contribute
the most to the overall international advance, has everything
to do with how much this trend not only becomes a force
politically and ideologically, but takes organized expression
which furthers the dialectic of our being able in fact to both
feel and quicken the pulse of the masses as the objective
conditions provide more and more of a basis for that.

If these questions are not put out to the masses, as well as
struggled out and grappled with within our own ranks, we cannot
go into the storms that will be erupting ahead, including the
possible development of a revolutionary situation in this
country, as strong as we can and, in that sense,
must—not only in this country but
internationally as well. This is a question that has been
underrated and which we cannot afford to underrate any longer
or fail to pay consistent and intensified attention
to—without turning it into some kind of new gimmick or
using it as a way of turning away from the road on which
we’ve been taking not only crucial steps but actual
leaps. Rather, this is a further continuation and a deepening
of the carrying out of the central task as understood in this
broad and all-encompassing sense.

So in conclusion, then, I want to return to the theme
running through all this: the crucial importance of our
internationalist orientation and the way that infuses all of
our tasks and the carrying out of our work in the light of our
basic analysis of spirals leading to the heightening of
contradictions and the shaping up of conjunctures on a world
scale—which is not just a general analysis but a concrete
analysis of developments in the world today and our special
responsibilities. Not only does there have to be a clear
identification of our trend, but we have to make a real living
thing among the masses of the question that we have a Party
which is ours and which we have to join and build and
strengthen as a crucial part of preparation for revolution,
without falling into the tailist notion of “it’s
your Party” (i.e., the Party of the “average
workers”) that the Mensheviks tried to carry out, that we
have a Party that actually expresses our proletarian and
internationalist outlook and interests, and whether it stands
or falls and whether it can play its role depends on
us and not just on it as an external
abstraction, or at least an external to us—all this must
be made a real living thing to the masses, particularly to the
advanced.

Although I don’t want to force everything together,
there is also the question of “roads to the
proletariat” which touches somewhat on this question of
party building as well as building the movement among the
advanced forces more generally. This applies in the U.S. as
raised in the talk “Coming From Behind to Make
Revolution.”48 But in closing I want to touch
upon it in terms of its international dimension. It’s
really not a principle that “no one can touch a single
hair on the social system of anyone else or any other
country,” or no one can “interfere” in
anybody else’s internal affairs. There is the question of
what methods we use in building the movement internationally,
as well as in the different countries—that is, the
correct versus incorrect methods. But part of that is precisely
recognizing and taking responsibility for what kind of country
the U.S., in particular, is. It is a country which has certain
features we can seize on to turn into their opposites for the
advantage of the international proletariat and to advance its
struggle. It is the kind of imperialist country that not only
plunders the whole world and squeezes the life out of people
but also, at the same time, drives large numbers of people into
it.

Take the example of Central America. The complexity and
contradictoriness of things is such that sometimes people
literally right out of the revolutionary struggle in these
countries are driven into the U.S. at the same time the U.S. is
the target of the struggle they’re part of. And
there’s a question of how that can be concentrated and
spread back out on the other hand to places where the
subjective factors and Marxist-Leninist movement are presently
not strong.

It’s not a question of violating the “Bergman
law” [a leader of the Menshevik clique]: that no one,
least of all us, should think that we have anything to say to
anyone else in the whole world, any ideas that anybody else
might possibly find worth listening to. It’s not so much
to violate that law as a matter of principle—though as a
matter of principle it should be violated. It’s much more
the question that if we are really grasping this proletarian
internationalism and its material and philosophical basis, we
have a responsibility to do this in a correct sense. Not that
we tell everybody what to do. I mean, if we tell people and
it’s good advice, that’s good and maybe they can
use it to make advances; if we tell them and it’s not
good advice, maybe they can negate it with good line. In any
case, that’s not the heart of the question.

The heart of the question is we have a responsibility to
figure out how to advance the movement internationally and that
includes taking advantage of some features of this imperialist
monstrosity and nerve center that our Party is in, and working
to strengthen the Marxist-Leninist movement where it is not as
developed, at the same time as we learn from where it may be
quantitatively and even, in a certain sense qualitatively,
weaker overall (or where it may be stronger in an overall sense
in a particular country). It’s not the question of petty
competition and bourgeois rivalry, even turned inside out
á la Bergman and false modesty. That is all
beside the point. The question is how to carry out our
responsibilities and how to turn something into a strength for
the international proletariat out of the hideous features of
this monstrosity of imperialism, and U S. imperialism in
particular.

In an overall sense, and to close with this, while we have
to do everything possible toward revolution in the U.S.,
it’s not just that that we have to do. And
it’s not just that our greatest contribution to the world
struggle is to make revolution in the U.S. Even that’s
too narrow, though in a more limited sense there’s truth
to it. We have to look at it even more broadly. In fact, even
seeking to make revolution in the U.S., even that has to be
done as part of the overall goal and with the overall goal in
mind, of doing everything possible to contribute to and advance
the whole struggle worldwide toward communism and in particular
to make the greatest leaps toward that in the conjuncture
shaping up.

Bob Avakian, “The Prospects for Revolution and the
Urgent Tasks in the Decade Ahead,” excerpts of
documents from the third plenary session of the Second
Central Committee of the RCP, USA, Revolution,
Vol. 4, No. 10-11 (Oct./Nov. 1979), p. 6-19.

Bob Avakian, “Outline of Views on the Historical
Experience of the International Communist Movement and the
Lessons for Today,” an excerpt from “For Decades
To Come—On A World Scale” (report adopted by the
Central Committee of the RCP, USA, in the end of 1980),
Revolution, June 1981, pp. 4-9.

Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile and Revolutionary
Communist Party, USA, Basic Principles For The Unity Of
Marxist-Leninists And For The Line Of The International
Communist Movement (a draft position paper for
discussion) (Chicago: RCP, 1981).

A Proposal Concerning The General Line Of The
International Communist Movement (Peking: Foreign
Languages Press, 1963).

“Crisis and War: The Mood and Conditions of the
Masses,” excerpts from a chapter in the forthcoming
book, America in Decline,
Revolution, Vol. 5, No. 2-3, February/March
1980, pp. 17-31.

Central Committee of the Communist Party
(Marxist-Leninist) of China, “By Putting the Party on
Trial, the Reactionary Force Following the Road of Capitalist
Restoration Has Itself Been Indicted, A World To
Win, No. 1 (Nottingham, Great Britain: Red Star
Publications, 1981), p. 43. The second pamphlet referred to
appeared on page 3 in the Revolutionary Worker,
No. 120, September 4, 1981, under the headline,
“Message from China’s Revolutionary
Underground.”